The Woodland Witch

  Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage--for the final time. What a journey it's been. I really don't know what to say--other than that I've truly enjoyed my time here. The woodland witch will remain in the cottage, though I do foresee some trips to the town bookstore in the near future. Sometime through the term--I believe it was when we were reading Calvino, to be exact--I decided that once the term had concluded, I'd go out and buy myself physical copies of the books that I'd liked to have spent more time on. And there were many. There were books that I wished we could've spent more time discussing, even though they weren't mandatory reads. Ninety minutes--not even--didn't seem enough to cover everything, especially with the way that new ideas would spring up during discussion because of something that someone else had observed. I think that perhaps my only regret for this class is that I didn't speak out more. Because there was nothing to r...

  Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  I’m breaking the fourth wall again for these last two blog posts—this one on Love Me Tender and the upcoming Conclusions post. I think it lets me say a little more than when I’m playing at the woodland witch.  So, getting to this final novel (wow)—I was really taken off guard by how quickly this book took off. It hit the ground running and stayed running, with all the commas making each sentence feel almost disconnected. I had to pay close attention to the capital letters and the punctuation to make sure I was following the sentence structure properly, and knowing who was saying what.  It kind of felt like I was being slapped in the face with every new statement that Debre dropped, and it was really conflicting for me because I kept getting checked like, ‘I really need to wait until I’ve finished reading this sentence and the next three sentences before I come to a conclusion’. It felt like I was constantly trying to j...