Tag: classics
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A Few Classics That Are Not Hard to Read
Classics are usually heavy reading. Even if they’re short, the language is unfamiliar enough that they take a long time to get through. But every once in a while you find one that surprises you, and here are three that surprised me. Note: I’m not including any classics described as ‘children’s literature’ in this list.…
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When a Hurricane of Clichés Equals a Great Movie
Today, I’m going to talk about Casablanca. If you want to know more about why I care about Casablanca, check out my previous post, ‘Writing Reality – Or Escaping It‘. “Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology… And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories…
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Oh, Libraries!
“Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” – Saul Bellow, in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”, from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) I once made an acquaintance with a man who had the most amazing library. It wasn’t the biggest library…
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The Dangerous Business of Recommending Novels
And the Dangerous Business of Reading Recommendations Someone lends you a book, telling you it’s “fantastic,” “will change your life forever,” or that you “have to read it.” You take and swear you’ll read it. Then it sits on your bookshelf for the next twelve months, while you stare at it and promise yourself you…
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Those Pesky Phoenicians! – A Thought From Herodotus
According to the learned Persians, it was the Phoenicians who caused the conflict. – Herodotus, The Histories That is the beginning of Herodotus’ explanation for the war between the Greeks and the Persians (you know, the war that movie 300 was sort of, supposedly, set during). Pretty typical how the blame gets passed on to…
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That’s Not Shakespeare! Or Maybe It Is
“Alas, poor Yorick!” – Howl, from Howl’s Moving Castle, quoting Shakespeare When I first read Howl’s Moving Castle, I didn’t realize this was a quote from Shakespeare until I read Hamlet a year later. Funny how we tend to attribute things to the last person that we remember said them, whether or not they actually…
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A Thought From C.S. Lewis – On Reading the Classics
“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.” – C.S. Lewis (full text found here) Very…
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