I’ve read a few Pulitzer Prize winning books for fiction this year, and realizing that got me wondering: how many of the winners have I read? I’ve pasted the list of all wining books below by year. The bolded ones are those I have read. It looks like I have read 34 of them. I... Continue Reading →
I don’t even know where to begin in describing and reviewing All the Light We Cannot See (2014) by Anthony Doerr. It is a sweeping and gorgeous novel about Germany and France during World War II. In some ways, it is "just" another one of those novels capitalizing on the horror and tragedy of our... Continue Reading →
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee might just be the perfect book. It is number 5 on the BBC book list, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. As I reread it for this post, I gaped at how perfect it is. It is essentially many stories told through the eyes of Scout, or... Continue Reading →
This book is too complicated for me to convey to you in any sort of detail or even coherently. I will not be spoiling the overall plot of the book in this review. I will say that it is about art, specifically a painting called “The Goldfinch” (1654) by Carel Fabritius. It is about secrets. ... Continue Reading →
A few months back I posted My Top Ten Classic Novels for Teenage Girls. It has become my second most-viewed post ever, just behind Seven Annoying Things People Say To Pianists, which also created a lot of conversation. I felt somewhat bad about making this list for girls. I hate to gender stereotype and I... Continue Reading →
I’ve been a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri’s since reading her first novel The Namesake (2003), and I moved from there to her short stories, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999). I will read anything she writes. So when her second novel The Lowland (2013) came out last year, I jumped at the... Continue Reading →
My most popular, most viewed, and most commented post is Unwanted Reading Recommendations: Borrowing, Returning, and Remembering Books. It is my complaint about people recommending books to me or giving me books to read that I’m not interested in or that I know I won’t like. Since I started this blog, I tend to get more... Continue Reading →
I’ve been wanting to read Pulitzer Prize–winning book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785-1812 (1990) by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for years. Ulrich has been a sort of role model/celebrity to me because of her achievements with this book, but also for her life. She is a member of... Continue Reading →
Robert at 101 Books (one of my favorite blogs) is currently reading All the King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren. Robert’s posts about the novel and his upcoming review of it have prompted me to remember my experiences with reading and writing about it. All the King’s Men won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947,... Continue Reading →
I have ancestors—my great grandmother, Alabama Gray (she preferred to be called Bonnie), in fact—who traveled from Oklahoma to California between 1910 and 1920, just before the dust bowl and depression were pushing people from the mid-west to the west in search of work. I have known this for some time now, and recently, in... Continue Reading →
The Bookshelf of Emily J. 