Tag: novel
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The Haunting Waters of A River Runs Through It
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing” –opening lines Anyone who has ever gone fly fishing knows it to be a complex art -almost spiritual in nature. Fly fishing forces a man to slow down, find rhythm, and discover patience and harmony with nature. In Norman Maclean’s A River […]
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The Meaning of Innocence in To Kill A Mockingbird
“‘…before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience’” (105). I have always loved To Kill A Mockingbird. It is a gentle and compassionate novel confronting a difficult subject matter -the issue of racism in America. As I […]
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The Writer’s Endurance: The Old Man and the Sea
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish” (opening line). The Old Man and the Sea is a rich and deep novella about an old fisherman named Santiago and his Herculean effort to overcome a fishing dry-spell. […]
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Love and War In For Whom The Bell Tolls
For Whom The Bell Tolls is the novel that was supposed to win Ernest Hemingway his first Pulitzer Prize in 1941. However, like Sinclair Lewis before him, Hemingway was denied the prize by the President of Columbia University. As the story goes, the 1941 Novel Jury recommended several books for the Pulitzer Prize including, but […]
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The Grapes of Wrath: An Epic Dust Bowl Tragedy
“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth” (opening lines) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s epic story of a Dust Bowl migrant family, celebrated its 80th anniversary this year. The novel was originally born out of a […]
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Thoughts on Years of Grace
I am thoroughly enjoying reading through these early Pulitzer-Prize winners. Margaret Ayer Barnes’s Years of Grace is a delightful novel –it is surprisingly whimsical for a 600-page book, yet it is unfortunately lacking in substance. Margaret Ayer Barnes spends a great deal of time describing the world of little Jane Ward –the books she reads, […]
Great Books Guy 