Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
The 20th century contains a lot of small movements, categorized by modern history. Some are more prominent than others, and some are very difficult to define. That’s where the contemporary label comes in.
Post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-post-modernism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, hypertexts, and modern genre fiction can all be found here. Books that don’t fall into a broader movement can also be found here, including many topics of interest that are still current for readers.
Contemporary works were written mostly in the last 100 years. These books are usually a bit easier to find on shelf (though not always) in a bookstore.
You are viewing Contemporary reviews.
You can view all other eras/movements, or you can search by language/region, genre, editor/translator, book authors, or year of edition.
There’s something very comforting to me about children’s books that rhyme. I grew up with Dr Suess and Mother Goose and I was read to before bed every night. It was rhyming stories that rocked me to sleep and it was rhyme that I first learned to read before I was formally taught to.
I intentionally saved Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales for Christmas Day because it has become my favourite Christmas story over the years (or, at the very least, it sits in a firm tie with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol).
n many ways, the collection met my expectations. It includes a lot of interesting ephemera from literature, some traditional Christmas classics, as well as excerpts from letters, newspaper items, and a substantial amount of poetry.
When I was initially planning this post, I was only going to review only The Things They Carried, but after reading In the Lake of the Woods, I think they go together thematically and both share a focus on war and the aftermath of it. And so I’ll discuss both here.
All three novels revolve around two brothers, Claus and Lucas. They are twins. Perfect reflections of one another. In The Notebook, they are abandoned at their grandmother’s during a brutal war (presumably World War II) in their country (presumably in Europe) and, using a notebook, they practice hardening themselves against outside threats and internal ones as well.
This drama is a great example of the power of monologue. If you come from a place of studying prose literature, your urge is to cringe when you turn the page in the play and come across a big block of text. But, actually, a monologue is a blessing rather than a curse.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is a classic and compelling play centering around one poor Black family struggling to get ahead in 1950s Chicago.
What Kushner excels at is creating a sense of endings and of a grief that hangs above each of the characters as they accept illness, accept death, and accept that change is coming whether they want it to or not.
I’ll leave it up for you to decide whether the novel lives up to its extensive praise. For my part, despite the book being outside my literary comfort zone, I did see what made it so ground-breaking and so influential. It was worth the read — as long as the graphic violence (including sexual violence) is something that you can tolerate as a reader.
Every essay is a painstakingly, achingly beautiful construction of argument. From word choice to phrasing, he has a way of driving to the point, but also doing so with a biting simplicity.
