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Book Reviews

  1. What I Read in 2012

    Here's a list of what I read last year with a brief rating of each book. At the bottom of the list are some reflections the reading year.

    The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain. 4/5

    Metamorphoses by Ovid (Charles Martin translation) 4.5/5

    Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. 4/5

    Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain. 4.5/5

    How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Forester. 4/5

    Candide by Voltaire (Translated by Robert ...
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  2. What I Read in 2011

    Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham -- 4/5

    Selected Poems by Paul Verlaine (Martin Sorrell translator) -- 3/5

    Weiland by Charles Brocken Brown -- 3.8/5

    B.P.R.D: Plague of Frogs by Mignola & Others -- 4/5

    Beowulf (Heaney translation) -- 5/5

    Grendel by John Gardner 4/5

    Selected Poems by Giacomo Leopardi (Eamon Grennan, translator) -- 4/5

    Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum. 3/5 ...
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  3. Book Review: The Song of Hiawatha by H. W. Longfellow

    I remember my grandmother reciting excepts from the the New England "fireside poets": Whittier, Bryant, Lowell and Longfellow. And I remembered reading some of their works in high school. Later, when I studied literature in graduate school in the late '90s, I was told that scholarly focus on those poets had faded and that, essentially, they were only novelties to skim on the way to the more sophisticated slave narratives and, later, to Whitman and Dickinson.

    Nothing they ...
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  4. Book Review: Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins

    This is my review of Billy Collins' book Sailing Alone Around the Room . It contains selected and new poems. Collins is America's poet laureate.

    A Blogger Reviews a Poet

    It's not that you don't discuss death.
    You do.
    And, of course, you're self-conscious.
    You all are.

    But you're funny, Billy. I smiled the best
    kind of smile when I read your poem on
    the long titles of some Chinese poems
    that you were reading ...

    Updated 03-29-2011 at 01:24 PM by The Comedian

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  5. Book Review: The Plague Dogs

    This post was also made in the Book Reviews forum of this site.

    Famous for authoring Watership Down, Richard Adams' The Plague Dogs rivals its more widely-read big brother in storytelling, thematic development, and playful sophistication.

    Just as mythology (and the telling of stories) supports the narrative of Watership Down, linguistic dialect (that of the English lake country) structures the confusion and flight of the dogs Rowf and Snitter from an animal experimentation ...

    Updated 06-26-2010 at 10:48 PM by The Comedian

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