In the blink of an eye, we have suddenly found ourselves with the last edition of The Book Club for this term. It feels like just yesterday I was writing my first recommendations for my favorite books for you all. I’ve loved writing this column and sharing book recommendations from both other Lawrentians and myself,…
The Book Club
As we slowly approach the end of the school year, I find myself looking back not only on the past few months, but the past few school years. While taking my trip down memory lane, I came up with this week’s prompt – books we all, or at least most of us, had to read…
The Book Club
Though we luckily got to see the sun briefly earlier this week, the dreary weather has once again returned to us, as we saw severe thunderstorms on Sunday night. Between the flashes of lightning and the occasional thunderclap, I was reminded of the classic mystery novel opening line, which usually points out that, “It was…
The Book Club
In this week’s edition, I once again decided to go around campus and ask a few fellow Lawrentians for their own book recommendations. After reading the printed copies of The Lawrentian over the past few weeks, I realized that they have all been bursting with recommended fictitious works. This is fine, of course, but there’s…
Book Review : “So Big”
Aestheticism and practicality are often at odds. Beauty and creativity are contained in aestheticism, while practicality is purely “down to earth.” These two philosophies come head to head, in the form of mother and son, between the covers of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “So Big,” by Appleton author Edna Ferber. “So Big” is a coming of…
Book review “Washington Square”
Novelist Arthur Phillips describes “Washington Square” by Henry James as “a very modern novel indeed: all questions, no answers,” which is exactly right. This novel’s plot is fairly simple and easy to follow; its language, while at times antiquated and erudite, is not very difficult to decipher or understand. Its length is average: a little…
Book Review: Stephen King’s “Dolores Clairborne”
Artists must always find new ways to present their ideas in order to distinguish their works from each other and from the works of other artists. In his 1992 novel “Dolores Claiborne,” author Steven King steers away from his favorite genre—horror—and abandons many conventions of novel-writing. The book consists entirely of the titular character Dolores…
Book Review: Sadegh Hedayat’s “The Blind Owl”
If you have ever read any of my reviews, trusted any of my recommendations, or placed any faith in my taste or my advice at all, I just want you to do one thing for me: Do not read this book. This is not because “The Blind Owl”—Iranian author Sadegh Hedayat’s most famous and enduring…
Book Review: Stan Sakai’s “Usagi Yojimbo”
If there is one thing in art that is both a blessing and a curse, it is this: nobody hates a consistent creator. If you do not have a masterpiece or a flop under your belt, you are not shackled to expectations, and nobody can dislike you. But, if you are never bad for decades,…
Nelson does “The Da Vinci Code” better in “Rex Mundi”
Pity Arvid Nelson. He got there first. Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” came out in 2003 and got the millions of copies sold and the movie version, even though both renditions of the story were terrible (except for Paul Bettany as Silas, of course). Arvid Nelson’s comic series “Rex Mundi” started in 2003 and faded…