Tag: Jane Smiley

Four Favorite Books from 2017

I’ve already written about the best books of 2017 for teachers, and so today I will focus on the other books that I’ve read this year. My “favorite” books are the ones that I am most likely to read again. Here they are:

1. Elizabeth Strout: Anything Is Possible… Read More

Five Best Novels of 2016

The five novels that rose to the top of my 2016 list are:

The best word to describe Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton is exquisite. What I love about Strout is her ability to dive right in to the heat of the moment without engaging in melodrama or … Read More

“Felicity rubbed a bit between her fingers. It was gray, just grit.”

Smiley3This 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 family’s decisions played … Read More

“Rosa was a perfect example of an only child, thought Claire – she behaved herself, but it was because she was always on the stage and the lights were always up. “

smiley2If 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, the second … Read More

“The perennial question of motherhood, Eloise thought, was how honest to be.”

smileyThis is the first book in a trilogy about a farm family in Iowa.  It begins in 1920 and runs for a hundred years, with a chapter per year. I’m among its many fans. As the LA Times says, the significance of moments “becomes clear only with the passage of … Read More