Traditions are important. They cultivate in us a continuum of the normal. They give us comfort, remind us of where we have been and how we came to be the people we are today. Some of the most important traditions are ones that we create for ourselves. It can be […]
Our Favorite Characters Who Never Gave Up To us, the best stories and characters are those about the underdog, the resilient fella who refuses to stop, who absolutely ignores the notion of “can’t.” These are the characters that stay with us, the ones we root for and who never leave […]
Madness is in the air. Certainly, the baskets and brackets that dominate March can bring folks near to insanity, but the courts aren’t the only place you can find folks teetering on the edge. In celebration of March Madness, our pick this week concerns the characters in fiction that are […]
Joseph Campbell had a theory about heroes. In his classic seminal work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell discusses the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. The hero, according to Campbell follows the same path or, ‘heroic journey’ : A hero ventures forth from the world […]
It’s nearly year’s end, when the best-of lists proliferate like winter grass in California’s rainy season. These reading lists are always great reading themselves, offering insight into the what books have been most influential, admired, or buzz-generating. I’ll likely be putting together my own list soon enough, but before that […]
There are books we love. There are, of course, books that resonate with us. There are books that make us laugh, make us outraged, motivate us to effect change. And then, there are books with the transformative power to alter the paths of our lives, that speak to us so […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.