Isak

Mary Caponegro: All Fall Down

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

Virginia Woolf: Three Guineas (Annotated)
Woolf extends her ideas on gender and economics to include the prevention of war. Written during the Spanish Civil War, and as Hitler and Mussolini moved to extend their dominion, Woolf receives a letter from a pacifist organization asking for her membership, her financial donation, and her opinion on how our society can prevent the brutal violence that the enclosed photos of murdered Spanish children and burnt homes indicate.

Woolf's response, in the form of a series of letters, is this book. Read my full review here.

Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line: A Confession (Vintage Classics)
Ah, the satisfaction of the short novel. Clocking in 132 pages, I was able to move swiftly through The Shadow-Line, which gave the narrative something of the sense of a deep inhale.

Read my full reviews here and here.

Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique
Let me be clear: Betty Friedan's seminal 1963 book is brilliant, startling, well-written, clear-sighted, and even better than I anticipated when I first picked it up. Bringing together insight and wide-ranging research to a gendered culture that was on the brink, it's apparent why the book cued a revolution when it was published to enormous acclaim.

There are, however, meaningful oversights in the book. Read my full review here.

Malcolm X: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
On the forty-third anniversary of Malcolm X's murder, I wrote about his life, his legacy and the warped way I'd learned of both until I read this brilliant book.

Read it (that is, my reflection) here.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
It's not by chance that this guy lives in St. Petersburg. The city is steeped in the fantastic, though it is seemingly the most logical of cities, and is thus the perfect metaphor for the plight of our liver-diseased, rationalism-loathing Underground Man.

Read my full reflection--on this short novel, and on St. Petersburg--here.

Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
Robinson's book can teach me especially about narration - something I think is lost in a lot of traditional fiction writing classes, banished under the moniker of it being "telling" rather than showing.

Read my full review here.

Mary Miller: Big World
Mary Miller writes a good story. The eleven collected in her first full-length book, Big World (Hobart Pulp) are dark-edged little treasures, funny and biting, strange and sweet. Set squarely in the South, Miller's tales are first-person variations on the the gothic traditions of her landscape: tiny tragedies with a sugar coating.

Read my full review here.