Establishing a read-aloud ritual can be one of the most gratifying ways to enjoy well-spent family time. If raising children leaves you with little energy or patience for personal reading, take comfort in knowing that reading aloud to kids can be as nourishing for the reader as it is for the listener(s).
Literacy experts agree that reading aloud to children from an early age helps assure their becoming avid readers later on.
Don’t limit reading aloud to preschoolers—school-age children and sometimes even teens love being read to. Add whatever embellishments you’d like—a warm beverage, a specific setting, lots of cuddling—to ensure a prominent place in your child’s memory for this time-honored ritual.
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Following is Professor Sarah Wyman’s analysis of The Awakening by Kate Chopin, an 1899 novella telling the story of a young mother who undergoes a dramatic period of change.
She “awakens” to her own desires, casting off the restrictions of her traditional societal role as wife and mother, and seeks her full potential as a woman.
Many times, we find Edna Pontellier awake in situations that signify more metaphorical awakenings to new knowledge and sensual experience. Read More→
This analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) highlights a long short story (or short novella) considered a feminist literary classic. The story starts with a bit of a mystery: the house seems to have “something queer about it.”
As we read on, it becomes clear that the house isn’t the only thing that’s “queer ” The secluded country home and the attic room the narrator inhabits come to represent or symbolize her tenuous situation and slippery sense of self.
The nameless heroine/narrator lives under her physician/husband’s care as a patient (deemed abnormal), subjected to the “rest cure” as a treatment for what appears to be postpartum depression.
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Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1973) is the story of an unconventional union, written by one of the couple’s two sons, Nigel Nicolson.
Vita Sackville-West was a novelist and poet was known for her role in the Bloomsbury circle and her intense friendship with Virginia Woolf; Harold Nicolson was a diplomat and scholar.
Though neither admitted it to the other when they were courting and in the early days of their marriage, both were primarily attracted to members of their own sex. Read More→
Those who write love to read, and those who love to read, love bookstores with a passion. Bob Eckstein, the noted New Yorker cartoonist, has created a unique and beautiful book, Footnotes From the World’s Greatest Bookstores: True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers.
The 75 meticulously detailed paintings of fantastic bookstores by Eckstein feature some of the most charming and iconic bookstores around the world. The art is embellished with charming, bittersweet, and often humorous anecdotes by writers, thinkers, and dreamers who have visited them.
Some of these bookstores have gone by the wayside, many, thankfully, are still open for business. Here, Bob shares the bookstore adventures of three contemporary women authors. Read More→
Twenty-something Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943) was conflicted. She had two consuming interests at the time: art and the study of fungi.
With the exception of letter writing and a journal which she started in 1881—in elaborate code, by the way—becoming a woman of letters was nowhere in sight. What happened to set and redirect the course of her life’s work?
Helen Beatrix Potter was born to wealth, so she didn’t need to earn a living. Her ambitions were more personal, bubbling up from some inner pool. Born in London to a posh South Kensington address, she and her younger brother, Bertram, were raised in the usual way for children of that social class—by a series of minders starting with nurses, then nannies, and finally governesses. Read More→
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia by Dame Rebecca West is ostensively a travelogue, published as a two-volume set of more than 1,100 pages and half a million words in 1941.
Published both in the United Kingdom and the US., the book presents an exhaustive history of the land and people of the Balkans. Publication coincided with the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, and West’s intention was to “show the past side by side with the present it created.”
West researched the book during a 6-week 1937 trip she made there with her then-husband, traveling over much of the terrain of the old borders, including Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, and more. Read More→
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974 – 1977 (1978) appeared early on in Adrienne Rich’s (1929 – 2012) long career and solidified her position as a leader who articulated the central ideas of the second wave U.S. feminist movement.
These poems, about and for women, envision an alternative to a patriarchal system in which men control the avenues of power and the definitions of female existence. In this analysis, we’ll discuss how this collection of poems continued to establish the primary concerns of Rich’s life’s work. These included the promotion of: Read More→
