"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." — Stephen King
September 8, 2016
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, perhaps the most dog-eared book on my shelves, doesn’t give advice on writing poetry. Instead, it’s what Einstein –his contemporary — might have written if he had been a poet. Compare the Theory of Relativity to this statement: … Read More
September 1, 2016
This 2015 winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction – “a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty” that is “highly provocative, thoughtfully presented” — is a meditation on race as a social construct. Written as a set of letters to his young son, … Read More
August 25, 2016
This is how the great-granddaughter of Iowa farmers Walter and Rosanna Langdon describes what’s left of the topsoil on the original family farm when she visits it in the closing pages of The Last Hundred Years Trilogy by Jane Smiley. We can see the how this … Read More
August 11, 2016
This is the first sentence in the chapter titled “Plurals before Swine: Blunders with Numbers” in Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner. The tone is light-hearted, which, as the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer noted, makes it readable … Read More
August 5, 2016
Now, however, Saundra Yancy McGuire believes that even the best teachers will not see the kinds of learning gains that are possible “as long as students do not come to our classrooms prepared to learn efficiently and independently.” This book shows faculty members how to teach students … Read More
July 28, 2016
If you were a novelist, what compliment would you most like to see in a review of your work? A comparison to Tolstoy, perhaps? That compliment was in fact given in the British newspaper, the Guardian, in a review of Jane Smiley’s novel Early Warnings… Read More
July 21, 2016
This memoir by Russell Baker encourages readers to write their stories for the generation that hasn’t yet asked for them. He shows us why he believes this: he will always regret not knowing better the person who told him how to see the world and his role … Read More
July 18, 2016
This is the final line in the poem “When Are You Coming Back? I’m Getting Tired of Waiting” from a collection of poems about grieving titled The Widow’s House by Sharon Chmielarz. It is one example of how the poet has achieved a “mastery of tone.” Tone … Read More
July 1, 2016
Recently, I visited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord, MA, which has the chair that Emerson sat in while he wrote his famous essay “Nature.” As a fan of what Anne Fadiman calls “You-Are-There Reading” I had to reacquaint myself with this wonderful piece. When it was … Read More
June 27, 2016
Can small changes in strategy result in significant improvements? This new book for college instructors by James M. Lang argues convincingly that they can. While some of the techniques are not new – my mother asked her students to make predictions 40 years ago – all the … Read More
June 16, 2016
As unlikely as it sounds, this quote comes from a letter of recommendation for an associate dean of student affairs applicant, who also happens to be the former lover of the creative writing professor who sends all of the letters in this hilarious expostulatory novel. His comments … Read More
June 9, 2016
Purely by coincidence, I was reading Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own during the week that the first woman became the presumptive nominee for a major political party in the U.S. In 1928, when Woolf gave a series of lectures on “Women and Fiction,” she described … Read More
June 2, 2016
No contemporary writer is better at convincing the reader that a person with many faults can be a hero than Richard Russo. His mixture of empathy, honesty, warmth and wit made Sully a heroic figure in Nobody’s Fool and makes Doug Raymer the equally-unlikely hero in … Read More
