Author: Kate Stover

“This is the story of a crisis in our lives . . . during a journey alone.”

With sequels, come skepticism, and when the first in the series won the Pulitzer Prize, it’s tempting to expect just a replay of what worked well before. One critic called for a better evaluation of American Life; others said it’s a mixed blessing of a book. I’m in the … Read More

10 Best Books for College Teachers Update

Now that the year is coming to a close, it’s time to pick up where my previous recommendations for books for college teachers left off. In alphabetical order, we have:

  1. The Spark of Learning by Sarah Rose Cavanagh: I’ve written about this book five times because I keep returning to
… Read More

“Mom, I don’t know who to trust!”

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel — a Christmas gift of the first order – is her most enigmatic. Reviewers have drawn wildly different conclusions about the book’s message. For me, the book explores what happens when you don’t know who you can trust. Lucy, the protagonist, finds that she can’t even … Read More

“Lately I’ve found myself reaching for the books of certain familiar writers, whose own zest and energy offer some kindly remedy to my condition.”

Perhaps you can relate to this: while I enjoy the holidays, I also am running low on the “zest and energy” that Mary Oliver describes in this essay. Her solution to this problem is to reconnect with familiar writers. Her book, which has been in my hands for thirty years, … Read More

“Observe, observe perpetually.”

More than 400 years ago, Michel de Montaigne of France invented a new literary tradition of close inward observation. “It is a thorny undertaking,” he writes, “to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind.” Scholars, such as Sarah Bakewell, credit him with being the first to experiment … Read More

“For what could be more peculiar than a crowd of grown-up people . . . discussing scholarly niceties that meant nothing to most of the world?”

One of the things that I love about Barbara Pym’s novels is that her characters never set out to impress anyone. They acknowledge that their choices – for example, attending an academic conference as treatment for a broken heart – are eccentric. They’re vulnerable, interesting, and sometimes fooled by … Read More

“I felt there was a lot more I could say about the subject of danger.”

In Half Broke Horses, Lily Smith faces many dangers, from flash floods in rural Texas, to bankruptcy during the Great Depression, to medical emergencies that didn’t always end well. This convincing, unprettified narration doesn’t glorify “grit” – rather, it shows the unintended consequences that can come with survival. For … Read More

“Judging by her publicity photos, the natural assumption would be that American novelist Edith Wharton wrote in a traditional manner, at the gold-tooled leather-topped desk in her extremely well-stocked library.”

But this was “in fact a deliberate illusion.” She wrote in bed. Why? Johnson suspects that it had something to do with the desire to delay getting dressed, which for women in the 1800s, meant getting tied into a corset. And there’s more: Proust lined the walls and ceiling of … Read More

“And you O my soul, where you stand, surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space . . .until the bridge you will need be form’d…”

And you, O my reader, where you sit, reading from a screen that holds more words than the mind can store, what do you do after reading Whitman’s poetry?  Some respond by “Whitmanizing” in bold statements or expressive art. The poet Czeslaw Milosz says that after reading Whitman, he experiences … Read More

“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world. . .”

Henry David Thoreau continues, “for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.” This beautiful image of Thoreau watching the stars from the deck of a boat comes right after he says that he decided to leave his cabin at … Read More

“Any radical change in poetic form is likely to be the symptom of some very much deeper change in society and in the individual.”

What a crank T. S. Eliot must have been! He is the champion of contradiction. Consider this: his difficult and complex poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” revolutionized poetry, and many consider it to be a prime example of social criticism. And yet, he wrote “To me … Read More

“When we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

When I was deciding whether to come back to teach one more year, I realized that the part that I like best is not giving information, it’s getting questions – especially questions that I have never explored before with students. This week, my last first week of the school year, … Read More

“Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth.”

Susan Cain, whose book Quiet launched her career as the Patron Saint of Introverts ten years ago, has written a new book that validates English teachers, artists, and everyone who is drawn to sad stories. Her argument – that “sorrow and longing make us whole” – is not new, but … Read More

“She gave me a piece of gingerbread which was so generously spread with salt butter that the richness was too much for me and I couldn’t eat it.”

Molly Weier, who was born in 1910 in Glasgow, had her own definition of what it meant to be rich. To her, it was having real butter instead of margarine and spreading it generously. This is how someone in her neighborhood lived, and it impressed her so much that … Read More