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	<title>Ron Gilmour</title>
	<link>http://rongilmour.info</link>
	<description>Librarian and Information Specialist</description>
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		<title>Tom Sawyer</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In the pantheon of Southern literature, the names of Twain and Faulkner stand matched for first place. Thanks to an enjoyable high school experience with As I Lay Dying and an excellent honors seminar on Faulkner as an undergrad, I have a pretty decent familiarity with that Southern luminary. Having less first-hand experience with Twain, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/180</link>
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		<title>Moby Dick</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One can hardly undertake a program of American literature without confronting Moby Dick, the quintessential Great American Novel. Perhaps due to its daunting size, or to a dimly remembered aversion to Billy Budd in high school, I have always put off this novel until another day, shamefully admitting with Laurie Anderson, “Moby Dick? Never read [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/177</link>
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		<title>Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Last summer, I read The Whole Five Feet by Christopher R. Beha, an account of that author&#8217;s journey through the Harvard Classics. I was struck by the fact that the first work in that series was Benjamin Franklin&#8217;s autobiography, so it seemed a natural choice for my year of Americana. Despite the efforts of an [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/173</link>
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		<title>Solar</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As previously noted, my reading plan for 2010 consists of a steady diet of classic Americana. Nevertheless, I could not resist the temptation presented by a new novel from Ian McEwan. While I don&#8217;t read a great deal of contemporary fiction, McEwan is one of the few living authors that I really get excited about. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/167</link>
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		<title>The Ambassadors</title>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;Of course I move among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric.&#8221; This statement by protagonist Lambert Strether sums up the experience of reading The Ambassadors by Henry James. The book is a bundle of contradictions: simple in plot yet endlessly complex in execution, expansive yet strictly circumscribed, a comedy and tragedy at the same time. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/159</link>
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		<title>The Country of the Pointed Firs</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I had never heard of Sarah Orne Jewett until my friend Brian included her novella The Country of the Pointed Firs on his impromptu list of recommended American works. I don&#8217;t think that this work has attained anything close to canonical status, but nevertheless I found it the most enjoyable of my recent American readings. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/157</link>
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		<title>The Last of the Mohicans</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m afraid that my foray into American literature is not off to an auspicious start. I have been defeated by James Fenimore Cooper&#8217;s The Last of the Mohicans. It isn&#8217;t a terribly long book, and I expected to have the fortitude to read it, but I have to admit defeat. I can only read a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/152</link>
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		<title>Mosses from an Old Manse</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been thinking lately about how little I know about the literature of my own country. Of course I read Huckleberry Finn, Billy Budd, and a few others in high school, and I took a seminar on Faulkner in college, but in recent years I have focused almost exclusively on Brit lit. So I&#8217;ve decided [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/149</link>
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		<title>The Whole Five Feet</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve seen their “Libertas”-becrested spines scattered among the classics in used book stores, but had never paid much attention to them. They are the Harvard Classics, and I guess they’re something of a cultural institution, or at least were a few generations ago. They are the work of Harvard president Charles William Eliot (1834-1926). Eliot [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/142</link>
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		<title>Some 2009 Darjeelings</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There was a lot of whining early on about how bad weather was going to make 2009 a bad year for Darjeelings. This may be true in a relative sense, but the teas that I’ve tried so far have been outstanding. Arya Estate First Flush After falling in love last year with Arya’s autumnal offering, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://rongilmour.info/archives/140</link>
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