literature

I’ve heard such good things about Margaret Atwood for years, but never managed to get around to reading one of her novels. I mostly do my reviews on Goodreads these days, but this being one of the best novels I’ve read this year made me want to devote a blog post to it. Narrative Structure … Read more

I’ve brought up John Ashbery a few times in previous posts. Over the past year, I’ve read his fifth book of poems entitled Three Poems (yes, it is a whole book, but only three poems long). These three poems are some of his most difficult and dense material (hence the year of non-continuous effort). Some … Read more

The first time I read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, I had nothing but criticism for it. I’ll try to set the stage for my first reading. It was my early undergraduate days about 10 years ago. A First Reading I had had a fairly sheltered childhood. I grew up in a highly apolitical house. At … Read more

Here’s a list of my favorite books that I read this year. Note that it may look like this list is meant to be “Favorite Books from 2014,” but it is a fluke that so many were actually published in 2014. I did the Goodreads challenge to complete 40 books this year (and I will … Read more

In this essay, I provide an analysis of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. I show it parodies the history of Critical Theory.

“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” is a short story that acts as a Rosetta stone for interpreting David Foster Wallace. It encapsulates much of what he tried to do in his writing. This is mostly meant to be a direct continuation of the last post on preparing to read Infinite Jest. But … Read more

I’ve been reading the biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max, and it reminded me that for years I’ve been meaning to do a blog post on some of the preparation you can do to have a much better experience reading Infinite Jest. First, I’m not doing … Read more

Since one of my most-read articles this year was my analysis of the passion narrative around Easter time, I thought I’d do another one on the Nativity Story for Christmas. I’m not going to present much historical analysis that the events depicted are fiction (it is well-known that there was no census, no slaughter of … Read more

I recently learned that some Barnes and Noble has an “essay” section. This will be my downfall. I was glancing through it and stumbled upon something that sounded fascinating. If you’ve been reading these articles for any significant amount of time, then you’ll know that influence is a topic that is endlessly fascinating to me. … Read more

I recently finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. Sometimes I wonder what is wrong with me. Why can’t I just read a book and enjoy it for once? Instead, I became obsessed with the religious symbolism of the books and what they meant. My theories distracted me. Partway through the last book, I got annoyed … Read more