Biblio Reviews

It was sometime in the last seven to ten years that I first read Jane Austen's Persuasion  (1818). It was during the summer, I think, after I fully acknowledged and accepted the charm and greatness of her stories.You would think that as an English major I would have been familiar and enthralled with her and her work, but truth be told, I had abstained from reading many of the "classics" which tend to be very Eurocentric.  In regards to Austen, in particular, I was required to read Pride and Prejudice (1813) for the first time my freshman year in college. The professor was certainly a fan of Austen and the novel and gave away everything. My professor, however, analyzed the novel for us to the point that I didn't even have to read it to write a major essay on it. In fact, the introductory paragraph to that essay remains one of my best and favorite to date. (I don't remember the details, just that the first sentence was beautifully phrased and encapsulated Austen...

Rabid fandom is one reason I've yet to watch  Titanic  and never got into  Friends,   Lost,  among many other highly successful films and TV shows. Instead, I tend to dedicate my viewing time to the underdogs, which is to say that a lot of the shows that I do like tend to get cancelled, i.e.  Arrested Development, Life, Chicago Code, Human Target, Men of a Certain Age.  To date,  The Good Wife  is the only one of my faves to have escaped that fate.  With that said, you can imagine how resistant I was to reading Rainbow Rowell, the darling of CBReaders. However, because my passion for reading is stronger than my passion for film/TV viewing, I broke down a couple of months ago and read her debut novel,  Attachments  (2011). In the end, the novel was a satisfying, nostalgic quick read. Much of my enjoyment came from the atypical male protagonist, Lincoln O'Neill, a diffident, non-alpha romantic lead. Set in 1999,...