Tina Fey — arguably one of the funniest, most influential comedians today — says that the rudest question you can ask a woman isn’t about weight or age. It’s a question that men are rarely asked, namely, “How do you juggle it all?” She says that people constantly ask her … Read More
Author: Kate Stover
“What do these extraordinary lines summon in you?”
The premise of Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Housden is this: great poems can be dangerous. They can make you question your assumptions, change your direction, and find the courage to start over. I believe that reading can lead to reflection that inspires transformation. In fact, I’m … Read More
“I began to think about what it means to be a facilitator of learning rather than a teacher.”
What is the difference between “educating people” and “helping people learn”? This classic book by Malcolm Knowles — the central figure in US adult education during the last century — explores the different sets of assumptions behind these approaches. Educators who lecture, for example, assume that their job is to … Read More
“You were right to tell me that in life, it is not the future which counts, but the past.”
What kind of person believes that the past is more important than the future? Wouldn’t the least likely be someone with amnesia? The central character in this novel by Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano is a Parisian who has no memory of his life before the second world war. It appears … Read More
“They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.”
When Suki Kim’s wrote about the six months she was as a teacher in North Korea, she was haunted by the idea that her book might lead to the punishment or even the death of her former students, who could be punished for knowing too much about the world. For … Read More
“There should be brief intervals of time for quiet reflection . . .”
In this 1938 book about educational theory, John Dewey continues: “But they are periods of genuine reflection only when they follow after times of more overt action and are used to organize what has been gained . . .” He famously observed that you don’t learn from experience, you learn … Read More
“We are, I know not why, double within us.”
Mark Haddon’s extraordinary novel The Red House appears to be built on the ideas and style of the essays written by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s, and I can’t think of a better, more inventive, choice. As we see with the “double within ourselves” line, he quotes Montaigne directly, … Read More
“If trees could speak they wouldn’t. . .
The poem continues: “. . . only hum some low green note, roll their pinecones down the empty streets and blame it, with a shrug, on the cold wind. During the day they sleep inside their furry bark, clouds shredding like ancient lace above their crowns.” These wonderful sentences, which … Read More
“…I lived in a series of all-decisive moments, and the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable….”
This is not a book for readers who hate getting lost when a scene on page 105 doesn’t get resolved until page 340. It is for readers who would like to see how a literary genius describes the challenges and boredom of a normal life. The story’s structure consists of … Read More
“Which way lies truth, in the end? In power, or in Art?”
Novelists make assumptions about their readers’ interest in technical details, whether they’re writing about sabotage, romance or philosophy. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is written by a philosophy professor who assumes we want to know the technical details of her two main character’s struggle to find a philosophy of life … Read More
“Tonight the windows hold all light inside: they fold it back on walls…
. . . and spill gold over things that tell us who we are.” This is from “Learning the Language” by Henry Taylor. It’s a beautifully constructed poem that follows strict rules of rhyme and meter. When he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, his love of form was … Read More
“It was terribly hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.”
What should the first sentence in a great novel do? Set the tone, establish the location and perhaps introduce the main character? The first sentence in Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout does more than that. It gives us the dying river image, which prepares us for the idea … Read More
“Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much.”
This comes from a speech by John F. Kennedy that pays tribute to Robert Frost. He said, “When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power … Read More
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deep thing.”
Are poems tools? The 90 contributors to this book think so. They describe how specific poems have helped them. For example, our line this week, from the poem “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, was submitted by a teacher who has those words tattooed on her leg. She writes, “It … Read More
“The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.”
Oh, how I love an unreliable narrator! Our quote is the first sentence of the novel, and it’s clearly a flat-out lie. (The strangest thing about anyone’s return from the dead is that it happened — of course people thought it’s strange.) So, if the main character tells us in … Read More