Author: J.L. Scheuermann
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Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Each time I teach a literature course, I ask my students some version of this question, “What is literature?” Often it’s a question they haven’t considered, and we usually end up discussing our class reading list versus some of the more popular novels they know of. This leads us to talk about why we are…
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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My good friend Krista regularly makes book recommendations to me and buys books for me, and I have loved every single one. That is remarkable to me. I don’t have that kind of success rate when buying gifts for my own husband and son. When I think about Krista selecting books for me, I am…
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A Christmas Carol (Stave Five)
Over the span of five posts, I have been looking at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a wonderful story about the dramatic process to effect one man’s complete change of heart. Dickens arranged the novella into five chapters or staves, as he labeled them. “Stave” has its roots in the word “staff,” as in a…
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A Christmas Carol (Stave Four)
Over the span of five posts, I am looking at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a wonderful story about the dramatic process to effect one man’s complete change of heart. Dickens arranged the novella into five chapters or staves, as he labeled them. “Stave” has its roots in the word “staff,” as in a musical…
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A Christmas Carol (Stave Three)
Over the span of five posts, I am looking at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a wonderful story about the dramatic process to effect one man’s complete change of heart. Dickens arranged the novella into five chapters or staves, as he labeled them. “Stave” has its roots in the word “staff,” as in a musical…
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A Christmas Carol (Stave Two)
Over the span of five posts, I am looking at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a wonderful story about the dramatic process to effect one man’s complete change of heart. Dickens arranged the novella into five chapters or staves, as he labeled them. “Stave” has its roots in the word “staff,” as in a musical…
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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Over the next five posts, I will be looking at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a wonderful story about the dramatic process to effect one man’s complete change of heart. Dickens arranged the novella into five chapters or staves, as he labeled them. “Stave” has its roots in the word “staff,” as in a musical…
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Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
Author Irène Némirovsky penned the following lines in her journal: “My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.” She wrote this a year into the German occupation of France during World War II…
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The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The first lines of a work are important. They get the piece moving, they set the tone for the work, they introduce us to the authorial voice. Think of some of the most memorable first lines. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”[1] “Call me Ishmael.”[2] “It is a truth universally acknowledged,…
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The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
“Ivan’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” I underlined that sentence when I first read the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy about a year and a half ago. I was prepping for a new World Literature class that I was soon to teach, and I…