It’s Fitzgerald’s thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent.

Maureen Corrigan

Categorized in : Worthy Longing Great American

To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.

Maureen Corrigan

hawks doors rooms

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

Maureen Corrigan

mash-up murder-mysteries meditation

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Maureen Corrigan

reading book people

Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or energetic culture.

Maureen Corrigan

healthy self reality

A hilarious academic novel that'll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom. . . . [A] mordant minor masterpiece. . . . Like the best works of farce, academic or otherwise, Dear Committee Members deftly mixes comedy with social criticism and righteous outrage. By the end, you may well find yourself laughing so hard it hurts.

Maureen Corrigan

finding-yourself laughing-so-hard hurt

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her “real” life.

Maureen Corrigan

real book thinking

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of wor... by Maureen Corrigan

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

Maureen Corrigan

virtue writing culture

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our life stories and – equally important – to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others.

Maureen Corrigan

understanding important two

All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

Maureen Corrigan

character book past

According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible.

Maureen Corrigan

streets wall book

I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies." pg. xvi

Maureen Corrigan

heart book thinking

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small.

Maureen Corrigan

bombarded-by real reading

Flawless . . . Tightly choreographed . . . Shipstead gains entry into exclusive worlds and trains her opera glasses on private social rituals, as well as behind-the-scenes hanky panky . . . Similar to classic ballet, the power of Astonish Me arises out of the pairing of a melodramatic storyline with scrupulously executed range of movement . . . Shipstead sweeps you into this insider world of sweat, narcissism, and short-lived magic . . . Transcendent.

Maureen Corrigan

sweat ballet glasses