Category: Books
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Hemingway’s Epigram
A big man named Hubert, a jazz singer, a skydiver, and a wife with a leopard print purse. It wasn’t a joke. The evening felt like something from a Hemingway novel. The Sun Also Rises, perhaps. But we weren’t in Paris. We were in Chartres. And it was 2020, not 1920. My point? Read Hemingway’s…
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The Purpose of Fairy Tales
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a favorite of mine. Written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, it demonstrates what fiction should do: teach a truth about the human condition. Fiction (good fiction!) usually penetrates the conscience better than direct truth. It’s one reason, I believe, children should still have fairy tales read to them.…
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The Clan of the Cave Bear
The series to which The Clan of the Cave Bear belongs was a favorite of my maternal grandmother. I can remember in the 80s and 90s, seeing the thick volumes laying on the little table next to her chair in the family room. But, aside from the first five pages just now, I’ve never been…
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Simone de Beauvoir and the Catholic Church
Given the opportunity, I would have asked Simone de Beauvoir many questions, the first being: Did you ever stop to consider that your Roman Catholic upbringing might have negatively influenced your reading of Genesis, and other books of the Bible? The second question (depending on her answer to the first): Have you ever made a…
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En herbe: Van Gogh to His Sister
De la vue qu’encadrait la fenêtre de sa chambre, il retint le bleu lavande du ciel orageux et des collines et les tons rompus de bleu-vert du champ de blé en herbe. — (Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh, 2013) From a letter of Van Gogh to his sister (Paris, 1887): “Now comparing people with grains of…
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Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement
Currently reading: Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement by Sue Ellen Browder. Because there’s always a hidden side of any revolution in thought, or otherwise… From the front: The chains that bind [a woman] in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up…