Happy Thanksgiving! Because it’s that time of year where we’re thankful, this week’s Book Traveling Thursday asks us to pick a book that we are happy to have read this year. I’m picking Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a classic that I read in an American literature class. I loved the story and the characters. I… Continue reading Book Traveling Thursdays: Happy Thanksgiving
I’m posting another set of mini-reviews. This time I am using the theme of American Realism, which was the class that I read Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson in. There were other stories, novels, essays and nonfiction books we read in the class, but I am using these two books… Continue reading Mini Reviews: American Realism Edition
Carrie Meeber, a young woman from Wisconsin, moves to Chicago in the 19th Century in hopes of finding work and becoming successful in whatever she does. When she finally gets to her sister’s, she has trouble finding and keeping work as an inexperienced worker. She meets a dandy traveling salesman on the train who helps her find her way in Chicago—for a price. What ensues is materialism, love affairs, and a fight for survival. Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser, is a critique on capitalism and a spectacle of power and industry.
A Bostonian woman, the unnamed narrator, moves to Dunnet, Maine, a small coastal town. Mrs. Almira Todd, her landlord, keeps her company and invites her into the town and its history. The narrator rents a schoolhouse so she can focus on writing her novel and interviews some major figures in the town. Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed First introduces a small town in Maine from the outsider’s perspective in chapters that are like short stories.
Cat on the Bookshelf 