September 2, 2008 – 1:01 pm
~ buy this book ~
I first read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in college. Years later, what’s stayed with me is a fascination with magical realism and one story about Márquez. When he finished One Hundred Years, his wife Mercedes pawned her hair dryer and the electric heater in order to pay for postage to mail it to a publisher. Even then, they had to mail it in two parts because they didn’t have enough postage!
So what is “magical realism”? A story with fantastic elements – told as if those elements were absolutely normal. (I should put […]
November 1, 2005 – 1:18 pm
You know when you’ve had a really miserable day? There’s a million reasons why this can happen, covering everything from love to children, work and money. Well, I was having one. It was so bad that I felt as if misery were buzzing at the corner of my ears like background noise all day long. I spent the day at the university talking to graduate students (I’m Director of Graduate Studies at the moment) and eating too much. Then I dragged myself home through Penn Station, New York, only to miss my train and find that I had thirty minutes […]
First the romance:
The Color of Light
by Karen White I read one of Karen’s earlier books, and I still remember reading faster and faster, until finally I was speeding like a bullet train that had sprung the track. I cried and cried, reading that book. The good news is that there’s no reason to cry in this one. The bad news is that I found myself reading in the still of the night. I couldn’t hear a word from the children’s bedrooms; our fat Chihuahua, Milo, was sleeping on his back and my husband was sprawled on his stomach. There […]
