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Matt’s Weekly Reads, March 4, 2023
Spotlight Beartown (Beartown 1) Fredrik Backman (2016, trans. 2017) Beartown is a remote village in Sweden with a depressed economy and even more depressed spirit among its strong and hard, tight-lipped and stoic residents. The community can be forgiven, then, if it cares a little too much about its youth hockey team — which finally…
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Bookish Pairs: The Catcher in the Rye and The Fall
This year I’ve been making a concerted effort to read more classics. And the other week, I happened, quite unintentionally, to read J.D. Salinger’s much loved-and-loathed The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Albert Camus’ existentialist classic The Fall (published in French in 1956 as La Chute, and published in English translation the following year)…
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, February 25, 2023
Spotlight: The Woman Next Door || Weekly Roundup: All the Way Happy, Zorrie, The Catcher in the Rye, The Fall, You & I Rewritten, Better than Fiction, Hatchet
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Bookish Thoughts: On Reading Classics
As 2022 was winding down, I found myself in a plight shared by many readers. It’s a bookish version of the ‘tyranny of the immediate.’ Namely I found myself reading almost exclusively new or recent releases. This is the problem with being present in the bookish world. Seeking out reviews, blogs, podcasts, and social media…
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, February 18, 2023
Spotlight: How High We Go in the Dark || Weekly Roundup: When You Reach Me, The Call of the Wild, Punch Me Up to the Gods, When We Were Very Young, Because of Winn-Dixie, Big Kids, Bear
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From the Backlist: Girl, Woman, Other
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo (2019) In Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other, we are introduced to twelve different, loosely connected, British Black women living twelve very different lives: A radical feminist playwright finds herself disappointed by her daughter’s less zealous attitude towards gender; a rural English woman is shocked to discover she…
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, February 11, 2023
Spotlight: Fraternity || Weekly Roundup: The Locked Room, Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, The Lost Stories, On the Road, Decolonizing Design, Winnie-the-Pooh, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Mooncop, A Dangerous Business
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Matt’s Weekly Reads, February 4, 2023
Spotlight: Babel || Weekly Roundup: Oryx & Crake; Ghosts; Ziggy, Stardust & Me; The Giver; Harriet the Spy; Love and Other Words; The Magic Fish
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Some Lesser-Known (but still great) Reads for Black History Month
February is Black History Month. And while there are so many classics written by Black authors (Hello, Beloved, The Color Purple, Purple Hibiscus, and so many more!), I thought I’d share some titles that I love that aren’t quite as well-known, from both Africa and the Black Diaspora, Don’t Cry for Me, Daniel Black (2022):…
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Reads for the Head and Heart, December 2022 and January 2023
Spotlight: Praying with Jane Eyre || Roundup: Revelations of Divine Love; Thomas Berry, Selected Writings; Another Way; Reflections during Advent; Come, Thief; Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe; When God’s Ways Make No Sense
Matt's Books and Music
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Matt's Books and Music 