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Anna Karenina (Part One)
One of the things I’m learning about myself is that I need to listen to the classics as I read them. The non-colloquial language of Dickens and Austen and, now, Tolstoy just does not sink in for me the...
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Anna Karenina (Part Two)
Although most the quotes I highlighted dealt with our title character, she did appear to disappear for Parts Two and Three of the novel. It seems as though the majority of these sections follow Levin,...
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The Woman in White (Part One)
Collins’ novel exploded onto the blogosphere a few years ago and it seemed liked everyone whom I followed at the time named it one of their favorite novels of the year or a favorite. Period. For me,...
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The Woman in White (Part Two)
Please don’t take my delay in finishing and posting about Collins’ novel as a lack of interest. It’s entirely due to a lack of time. It was the perfect audiobook for the gym but, alas, school work took...
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Anna Karenina (Part Three)
Trying to read Tolstoy’s tome on a bus at 1 a.m. was not my brightest idea and thus I fell off the read-a-long bandwagon back in November at Week Five. When I fall behind, I fall behind. I spent this...
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Anna Karenina (Part Four)
I finished Anna Karenina! I am both elated and relived as I managed to tackle a fear of Russian literature and finish a classic piece of (translated) literature spanning 1,441 pages. What a way to end...
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Great Expectations
I’ve spent the last week cleaning data sets and copy data from geodatabases into Excel spreadsheets and while good practice for my own honors thesis and future research endeavors, it’s not exactly the...
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To the Lighthouse
I’ve struggled in the past to follow and appreciate Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style, making my way only a chapter or two into her books before setting them aside. The audiobook version of this...
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
GoodReads tells me that I’ve tried reading this book a total of three times — once in June 2009, once in November 2010, and now again in June 2012. The first time I tried reading the novel in print...
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Hard Times
When Louisa Gradgrind, trapped in a loveless marriage, falls prey to an idle seducer, the crisis forces her father, Thomas, to reconsider his cherished utilitarian philosophy. The development of the...
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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The first time I read Hawthorne’s novel was in ninth grade. It wasn’t assigned reading for my class but rather I was intrigued by another student’s project on the book hanging in my English teacher’s...
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Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (Part One)
Fallada’s book has garnished particular attention since its publication because the book was written by a non-Jewish German victim of the Holocaust and was one of the fist books written by a German...
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Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (Part Two)
It took me exactly a month but I finally stopped dragging my heels and finished Part Two of Fallada’s novel entitled “The Gestapo”. Anna and Otto Quangel have begun distributing postcards encouraging...
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All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
Wyld’s novel straddles time and space — its main character Jake Whyte, a woman in the male-dominated sheep industry, lives on an unnamed British island during the odd chapters and spends the even...
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Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
A timely read given the rising fears about ebola — at least, according to my book club — Brook’s novel opens in 1666 and introduces the reader to their narrator Anna Firth, a widow who lost her two...
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The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Set during the American Civil War, Crane’s classic novel follows Henry Fleming, a young private in the 304th New York Regiment of the Union Army who deserts during battle after deciding the odds are...
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The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Adiga’s novel centers on Balram Halwai as he writes a letter to the visiting official from China relating his own life as an example of the entrepreneurial spirit...
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Angelou’s autobiography is, unfortunately, one of several books assigned as required reading during high school where my teacher decided we should watch the film version rather than read the original...
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Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff
The last queen of Egypt has been re-imagined in history as a seductress by the likes of William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Elizabeth Taylor. Yet Schiff presents a woman who ruled an empire during a...
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The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Subtitled “Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism”, Goodwin’s book follows the collusion of Taft and Roosevelt during the progressive era through the fracturing of...
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