Movie Mondays

The Blank Wall | The Deep End

Book, 1947 by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding













Movie, 2001 directed by Scott McGehee & David Siegel

Features: Tilda Swinton, Goran Visnjic, Jonathan Tucker

Storyline: With her husband perpetually away at work, a mother raises her children virtually alone. Her teenage son is testing the waters of the adult world, and early one morning she wakes to find the dead body of his gay lover on the beach of their rural lakeside home. What would you do? What is rational and what do you do to protect your child? How far do you go and when do you stop?

Awards: Tilda Swinton was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress.

Have you read the book or seen the movie?

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Wednesday Wish List

Rescue by Anita Shreve



A rookie paramedic pulls a young woman alive from her totaled car, a first rescue that begins a lifelong tangle of love and wreckage. Sheila Arsenault is a gorgeous enigma--streetwise and tough-talking, with haunted eyes, fierce desires, and a never-look-back determination. Peter Webster, as straight an arrow as they come, falls for her instantly and entirely. Soon Sheila and Peter are embroiled in an intense love affair, married, and parents to a baby daughter. Like the crash that brought them together, it all happened so fast.

Can you ever really save another person? Eighteen years later, Sheila is long gone and Peter is raising their daughter, Rowan, alone. But Rowan is veering dangerously off track, and for the first time in their ordered existence together, Webster fears for her future. His work shows him daily every danger the world contains, how wrong everything can go in a second. All the love a father can give a daughter is suddenly not enough.

Sheila's sudden return may be a godsend--or it may be exactly the wrong moment for a lifetime of questions and anger and longing to surface anew. What tore a young family apart? Is there even worse damage ahead? The questions lifted up in Anita Shreve's utterly enthralling new novel are deep and lasting, and this is a novel that could only have been written by a master of the human heart.

See what Anita has to say about her newest book.

Are you an Anita Shreve fan? Which one of her books is your favorite?

I've read a bunch of her books, but I think my favorite was Body Surfing.

Sunday Survey

Has anyone started reading The Truth-Teller's Lie?

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3=I like it.
2=It's just okay.
1=I don't like it.

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis.

The first of Sinclair Lewis' great successes, Main Street shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism. Reflecting his own unhappy childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis' sixth novel attacked the conformity and dullness he saw in midwestern village life. Young college graduate Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local doctor, and tries to bring culture to the small town. But her efforts to reform the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed, conventionality, pitifully unambitious cultural endeavors, and--worst of all--the pettiness and bigotry of small town minds.

Lewis' portrayal of a marriage town by disillusionment and a woman forced into compromises is at once devastating social satire and persuasive realism. His subtle characterizations and intimate details of small town America make Main Street a complex and compelling work and established Lewis as an important figure in twentieth-century literature.

You can read Main Street online for free at The Literature Page.

Did you know? Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for one of his other works, but he refused it. He also won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he accepted.

Have you read this classic or anything else by Sinclair Lewis?