Category Archives: books

Finished 4 more books

Posted on August 14, 2018 by forstegrupp

While I was in England, I finished Orson Scott Card’s novel Enchantment which has time-bending, a sleeping princess, linguistics, Baba Yaga, Russian politics, Jewish identity, and lost medieval kingdoms. Card certainly did he research into Proppian structural analysis of Russian … Continue reading →

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Reading Harry Potter — again

Posted on August 9, 2018 by forstegrupp

Recently SH bought the complete Harry Potter series for the kindle. He has been reading it steadily and is far far far ahead of me. I just downloaded the series to my phone a few days ago as a diversion … Continue reading →

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What does the Groundskeeper read at Oxford?

Posted on August 1, 2018 by forstegrupp

Yesterday morning I headed to the Ashmolean Museum for an appointment to see Pre-Raphelite drawings in the print room. The museum opened at 10 am so I had about 15 minutes to wait and I went and sat down on … Continue reading →

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What is the Night Porter reading?

Posted on July 30, 2018 by forstegrupp

Yesterday evening after a Chopin and Beethoven concert at the Sheldonian Theatre, we walked back to Worcester College. Every college in Oxford (and Cambridge for that matter) has a single entrance for scholars, students and other folks staying at that … Continue reading →

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Atwood approved

Posted on July 8, 2018 by forstegrupp

Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power was published in 2016, and it certainly responds to the current political times in the guise of fictionalized history as modeled by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.  The basic premise is that females of the … Continue reading →

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Jane Austen + Time Traveller

Posted on May 16, 2018 by forstegrupp

This is the latest book which I downloaded from the local library to read on my kindle (ipad). Kathleen Flynn’s basic premise is that the invention of time travel allows researchers to go back in time. The female narrator and a … Continue reading →

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A book about a special garden on Kauai 

Posted on August 8, 2016 by forstegrupp

When our middle boy graduated from high school on 2013, we went to Kauai for two weeks. One day we toured the garden established by the Allertons when they settled in Kauai in the late 1930s to escape repressive laws … Continue reading →

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Summer reading at last!

Posted on June 11, 2016 by forstegrupp

Folks sometimes ask during the school year, “What are you reading?” They expect me to reel off a long list of titles with short critical assessments. That is not the answer they get. “Right now, nothing.” This is always true … Continue reading →

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Anticipation for what they will say about Song of Solomon

Posted on May 11, 2016 by forstegrupp

In a few hours, my class of juniors will troop into class for our discussion of the last chapters of Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. This was not a book I was at all eager to teach because of the … Continue reading →

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Reunited with Chaucer

Posted on February 4, 2016 by forstegrupp

Just this past week, teaching a new class required that I rediscover Geoffrey Chaucer. Sometimes folks will ask me what book I would want on a desert island. I usually say the Riverside edition of Chaucer. That huge tome has … Continue reading →

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