#whatireadovershabbat Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970; Vintage, 2007) The Bluest Eye is a hard book. Hard because Morrison, as...

#whatireadovershabbat Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch Barley Patch, by Australian writer Gerald Murnane, is one of the weirdest and most...

#whatireadovershabbat Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov , translated by Michael R. Katz (1880; Norton, 2023) I never thought I’d feel Crime and Punishment was a “tight” 600 pages. But after The Brothers Karamazov , which clocks in at 900, the adjective seems right. Dostoevsky’s last and some say greatest novel portrays a uniquely unhappy, unhinged family and the murder that changes them forever. No writer has paralleled Dostoevsky’s sensitivity for human weakness, an

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading Paradise Lost and going round...

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Droshes un ksovim , edited by David E. Fishman (Ktav, 2009) Yiddish has become very fashionable. I should know, I studied it for a long time. But Yiddish isn’t some fun accessory, Rabbi Soloveitchik warns. The language matters because for almost a thousand years European Jews lived, thought, and breathed in it. The Holocaust ended that lineage. Whatever the topic in Soloveitchik's Droshes un ksovim (speeches and writings), his words vibrate with t

#whatireadovershabbat Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989; Everyman's Library, 2012) An aging butler goes for a trip in the...