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About Me
- Mrs. C
- I am a secondary English teacher in a rural, upstate NY school district. My first 'blog, How Do We Tell Ourselves the Truth, is designed to support my students in a college-level humanities course it is my academic pleasure to teach. I recently added another, Crowding the Head Space, which serves as a spot where my immediate colleagues can join me in reviewing books, often in consideration of adoption for curricular or lending-library inclusion, other times just for the sheer joy of it. Contents of both sites are copyrighted, and you should keep your greasy little paws off 'em--unless, of course, you provide appropriate citation.
Darwers & Booths is truly cutting-edge stuff. Its genre is metafiction, and it is ever so much more fun a romp through that forest than the preceeding sample I'd read--The Hours. A romp, yes, but serious business, too. All of the "great" human questions are addressed (fate, fortune free will, the human impulse to nobility, our responsibility to one another as we share space on this plane, why bad things happen to good people...all of it, all) and all of those "smaller" questions that probably just we English-geek types consider regularly are also up for review--the nature of text, the relationship between the reader and the text, the relationship between the author and his/her narrator and "their" characters--and some of them in a startlingly new way (who knew that when a character is off the page, his or her "authentic" personality would emerge, while he/she takes five and has a cuppa or whatevs?)
ReplyDeleteSo, bottom line, this one so tweaks my readerly sense that I am adopting it for use in my Adv. 12/AP Eng course--hopefully with copies to arrive in tome to assign it to THIS class! Happiness is a cool book, baby.