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Matt’s Weekly Reads, March 25, 2023
Spotlight: The Gospel according to Lazarus (aka The Lost Gospel of Lazarus) || Weekly Roundup: Tempest-Tost, Cinnamon & Gunpowder, One’s Company, Tin Man, Do I Know You?, A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
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My Bookish Hall of Fame: Introduction
My recent foray back into reading ‘classics’ has got me thinking a lot about what makes a book ‘good’. What are the criteria that make a book work for me as a reader, and how does that relate to a book’s overall quality and reputation? The more I thought about it, the more complicated it…
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, March 18, 2023
Spotlight: Galore || Weekly Roundup: The Manticore, World of Wonders, Funny You Should Ask, The Tempest, Earth’s the Right Place for Love, Gathering Blue, Lumberjanes
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, March 11, 2023
Spotlight: Fifth Business || Weekly Roundup: Dubliners, Late Nights on Air, Well Traveled, The Long Run, Chef’s Kiss, Autobiography of Red, Little House in the Big Woods
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, March 4, 2023
Spotlight Beartown (Beartown 1) Fredrik Backman (2016, trans. 2017) Beartown is a remote village in Sweden with a depressed economy and even more depressed spirit among its strong and hard, tight-lipped and stoic residents. The community can be forgiven, then, if it cares a little too much about its youth hockey team — which finally…
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Bookish Pairs: The Catcher in the Rye and The Fall
This year I’ve been making a concerted effort to read more classics. And the other week, I happened, quite unintentionally, to read J.D. Salinger’s much loved-and-loathed The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Albert Camus’ existentialist classic The Fall (published in French in 1956 as La Chute, and published in English translation the following year)…
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Bookish Thoughts: On Reading Classics
As 2022 was winding down, I found myself in a plight shared by many readers. It’s a bookish version of the ‘tyranny of the immediate.’ Namely I found myself reading almost exclusively new or recent releases. This is the problem with being present in the bookish world. Seeking out reviews, blogs, podcasts, and social media…
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, February 18, 2023
Spotlight: How High We Go in the Dark || Weekly Roundup: When You Reach Me, The Call of the Wild, Punch Me Up to the Gods, When We Were Very Young, Because of Winn-Dixie, Big Kids, Bear
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From the Backlist: Girl, Woman, Other
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo (2019) In Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other, we are introduced to twelve different, loosely connected, British Black women living twelve very different lives: A radical feminist playwright finds herself disappointed by her daughter’s less zealous attitude towards gender; a rural English woman is shocked to discover she…