Month: July 2017
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Two Sentences, Twenty-One Questions
If you like your epidemic-themed fiction cool, complex, and sickening, Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet is a book you shouldn’t ignore. Its opening chapter is a terrific place to practice deep reading, too. The first two sentences will give you a taste of what’s to come: “We left on a school day, so Esther wouldn’t…
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Sound or Fury? Pick a Side.
In his last post, Michael claimed that he kind of understood Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury after reading it like twenty-one times. I am still not impressed. I think these voices from Amazon reviews make as much sense as what Michael wrote: “I read this book back in college and I hated every moment…
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Flower Spaces and Flower Trees
The opening of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is the beginning of a long and arduous journey into a reader’s paradise. It’s also perfect to practice a little deep reading: “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” Generally, a good way to kick off a deep reading…
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A Few Words on Nabokov’s Lolita
Lolita (or, more precisely, Humbert Humbert’s first-person narrative after the “Foreword”) begins with an explosion of imagery, sound, and rhythm: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.…