I’ve been reading Robinson Crusoe, in preparation to teach it soon, and I like the following expression about the narrator’s experience:

Thus we never see the true state of our condition, till it is illustrated to us by its contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been searching for recently-published postcolonial books to assign in one of my spring classes. I loved reading Never Let Me Go in my search. It is very beautiful and subtle.

A few days ago, I read Alan Jacobs’s new book. I love these sentences, “Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us” (17).

Over the weekend, I recovered from a busy travel schedule with this wonderful book.

Over the weekend, I read two plays by Suzan-Lori Parks. I enjoyed her response to The Scarlet Letter.

I enjoy reading books that stir up good memories, like this one.

This summer, I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird for a Young Adult Literature course I’ll be teaching this fall. This time around, I was drawn to Atticus’s priorities as a parent as he describes his disciplinary decisions:

Bad language is a stage all children go through […] Hotheadedness isn’t. (116)

I have so much praise for Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1980), but here I’ll just say that I loved the narrator’s celebration of friendship between women as she expresses her wounds from patriarchy:

Friendship has splendours that love knows not. (56)

I finally got around to reading Ethan Frome, which a friend had enjoyed reading a couple years ago. I was intrigued with the story in the way my friend expected!