Posts in category Nobel literature
Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich
I recently read Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich as part of by Nobel laureate reading project, which is still slowly chugging along. She won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015.
This book took me about a month to get through, and while I’m glad I did, I probably won’t be reading more of her work anytime soon. The book contains mostly [...]
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
I took Babbitt with me on a trip earlier this summer because my copy is quite small and lightweight and Sinclair Lewis won the 1930 Nobel Prize for literature, and though it is going slowly, I’m still interested in reading Nobel laureates. Around the 80-page mark, I wasn’t so sure. The main character, George Babbitt, was entertain [...]
Prose and Prose-Poems of Gabriela Mis...
In 1945, Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. I recently picked up Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, a collection of her work published in 2002. Works in the book appear both in the original Spanish and translated into English by Stephen Tapscott. I wished the book had dated the work. I w [...]
Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro was the most recent Nobel laureate in literature. I read Remains of the Day in graduate school, and I’m left with memories of restraint and quiet regret but not a lot of more distinct feelings or pictures. I was planning on rereading that one, but it was checked out from my library while the ebook of Nocturnes was availab [...]
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
I read A Moveable Feast earlier this year as part of my Nobel literature project. (I read Old Man and the Sea in high school and A Farewell to Arms in college, but I’d want to revisit them before writing anything about them.) I read A Moveable Feast in Paris, where I was living a five-minute walk or so from 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, t [...]
Sula, Toni Morrison
I read Sula by Toni Morrison last December as part of my Nobel literature project. I read The Bluest Eye and Beloved in college. All three books have unsettled me and left me feeling like I need…something. I’ve been trying to write this reflection for a year. As the book fades from my memory, I feel like I need to at least say something [...]
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, Kenz...
I finished this book last February, but it was so disturbing I couldn’t bring myself to write about it at the time. This is a collection of four short stories/novellas by Kenzaburō Ōe, who got the Nobel Prize in literature in 1994. The stories are “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away,” “Prize Stock,” “Tea [...]
View with a Grain of Sand, Wisława Sz...
I first encountered Wisława Szymborska’s poetry on JoAnne Growney’s mathematical poetry blog. That poem, “A Contribution to Statistics,” hit me hard.
Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
— fifty-two,
doubting every step
— nearly all the rest,
glad to lend a hand
if it doesn’t take [...]
The Garlic Ballads, Mo Yan
I finished The Garlic Ballads a few months ago as part of my Nobel literature project, but it’s been hard for me to write about it because it was so draining. The book is dark, full of random violence, and bleak. If The Good Earth says that it was hard being a Chinese peasant in the early 20th century, The Garlic Ballads says it was har [...]
The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
I remember reading The Good Earth in middle school or so, but all I remember is that it was a very hard book for me. I think I read all the words, but I didn’t really get any meaning from the text. So I was surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been, at how much it grabbed me when I picked it up again earlier this month as part of my No [...]
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