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Category Archives: Personal Struggle
Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1973 (Little do a frustrated writer and a troubled car dealer realize, that their impolite author is using their journey to meet each other as an excuse to mastermind a deconstruction of modern values!) Sort of The Temptation of St. Anthony, sort of by Rabo Karabekian, 1950. Sort of Sateen Dura-Luxe acrylic […]
“The Judgment”
(“Das Urteil”) Franz Kafka 1912 (After treating a needy friend superficially for years, Georg finally pays the price.) This is an existentialist horror tale about a man Georg who treats a distant friend superficially, then pays for this crime with his life. The distant friend is sick, poor and unmarried. Georg cannot think of what […]
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger 1951 (He may not know what he wants to be in life, but he sure knows one thing he doesn’t want to be—phony! Unfortunately, the world doesn’t seem to agree with him). Holden Caulfield is a unique and precious personality in literature. Although I surely would not want to be subjected in all my […]
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding 1749 (Tom really wants to be good for the sake of his love Sophia, but his nature keeps getting in the way!) It is prudent to be morally pure– there can be weighty unseen consequences to any moral failure. Fielding’s signature novel has this ponderous theme, and yet manages not to be at […]


Uncle Tom’s Cabin
December 28, 2014 / Leave a comment
Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 (Two slaves struggle mightily: one for her liberty, the other for his integrity.) This novel, the best selling book in the nineteenth century besides the Bible, is a remarkably forceful argument against the world’s most blatant form of widespread institutionalized violation of human rights. It is a collage of slave lives and […]
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