A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All tagged art history
Geraldine Brooks’s most recent novel, Horse (2022), threads the lives of various characters existing across 150 years of American history into a powerful story. The three storylines braid together as the narrative builds; and it is a horse that binds the strands to one another. As she has did in People of the Book, artifact and historical characters speak to the lives of modern ones and a tapestry of individuals and subplots work their way toward mutual resolution.
I recently picked up Sarah Winman’s recent historical fiction novel: Still Life (2021). In addition to its beautiful cover of flowers and parrot, the reference to the world of painting in its title immediately piqued my interest, as did its setting of Florence, Italy.
As historical fiction, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) transports its reader to late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Italy as it follows the creative and personal life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel, The Great Believers, explores themes of trauma, lost generations, parenting, death, emotional inheritance, and the repetition of generational struggles as its weaves two stories throughout. One storyline begins with Yale Tishman in Boystown, Chicago circa the mid-1980s as AIDS lays waste to the gay community. The other takes Fiona (who was a very young woman affiliated with Yale’s world in the mid-‘80s) to Paris in search of her missing adult daughter, Claire, in the year 2015.
