50 Đề Thi Tuyển Sinh Lớp 9 Và Lớp 10 Môn Tiếng Anh (Trường Chuyên, Lớp Chuyên) tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Wang Juri _ang_uri — Maeve Binchy is a reliable choice for a story that presents characters with choices, then lets the reader enjoy the resolutions. As she often does, Binchy presents a set of people with a set of problems. Their interactions and choices involve the reader, and the reassuring outcomes are soothing. Sometimes that's just what I need!

Elena Rubio elenarubio — Jonathan Yardley's introduction explains that Frederick Exley had intended to publish A Fan's Notes as a memoir, but was asked to novelize it by Harper & Row, who feared libel actions. We have this amazing book, Yardley writes, a caustic masterpiece by a man who was essentially an alcoholic bum - he never held one job for more than a few months, he spent months or years crashing on other people's "davenports," including his parents' and various alumni of the mental hospital he had received treatment from: so where did this masterpiece come from? Exley was just a guy who had gotten interested in literature as an undergraduate at USC. Also, "no one knows for certain when and where he wrote it." This is a mystery with no witnesses! The novel is a ruthlessly honest portrayal of an addict's narcissism and self-loathing (two traits which are inseparable). We never find out what Exley's mental illness was (apparently the hospital didn't either), but even as a confessional of someone who just can't seem to get up off the sofa it's painful enough reading, without having a precise diagnosis. Exley pinpoints the source of his malaise after a street fight he picks with two gay men, one white, one black: "I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny - unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd - to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan." There's a relentless mid-century misogyny, an inability to see women (except one's mother) as anything other than Barbies with golden flanks, honeyed hair, and butterscotch epidermises. If women are not Barbies, they're intelligent but castrating Betty Friedans, or Amazonian harridans given battleship nicknames. Or, like Exley's fictional wife Patience, they're Bryn Mawr graduates who nonetheless need Exley's assistance writing up their reports for the divorce court judges they work for. The only sentient being Exley seems to know how to love with his whole heart is his mother's dog Christie III. The best passages from A Fan's Notes are on a writerly par with the best of Roth, Mailer, and Bellow. My two favorite passages come from the chapter where Exley has moved to Chicago for one of the few jobs he will hold, this one in the public relations department of a railroad. In this first passage he perfectly captures the essence of a place; so perfectly, in fact, that the same passage could describe this neighborhood today if you replace "airline hostess" with "Groupon sales rep": There I lived in that section called the Near North Side, a paradise for the young men and women - airlines hostesses with airlines hostesses, rising executives with rising executives, Junior Leaguers with Junior Leaguers, voyeurs with voyeurs - who overflowed its modern town houses and converted Victorian mansions, men and women who reigned, or were, in youth's obliviousness, sure they reigned supreme there. The section had an absurd though touching notion of itself as the Greenwich Village of the Plains; but the young men I knew there seemed blatantly and refreshingly unburdened with things of the mind, and the fine, corn-bred, yellow-haired girls as succulently wholesome as cream of chicken soup. Never once in the two years I lived there was I distressed by the possibility - as perhaps I was in New York - that there were men and women in the area seeking to commit to paper or to canvas their joy, their grief, their passion. Never once did I detect in a saloon, as I had begun to detect in the Village, the dark, brooding silhouette of a man apart, a man caught up and held in awe by the singularity of his vision. In Chicago Exley meets and becomes obsessed with a young (yellow-haired) woman named Bunny Sue Allorgee, who takes him home to spend a weekend with her parents, who live in a scary dystopia: The Allorgees lived in a suburb of a suburb, their particular little suburb being Heritage Heights. [As far as I'm aware, this is a made-up name.] It was a suburb that had apparently never caught on. The streets were all there, but there was only one house, Allorgees' Acres, a great, white, one-storied, rambling ranch-type place in which everything from garage to game room to hot-water heater was found on the single story that shot out in all sorts of clapboard arms, like the spokes of a painted wagon wheel. "The Heights" was not on any height at all; this was the American Midwest at its most grotesque, treeless and cold-looking as far as the eye could see, so that it only seemed set on high ground. There was only one thing that broke the endless blue monotony of the heavens - a television aerial that rose so high that it dizzied one to look up at it, an aerial which, I was proudly informed, put the Allorgees on certain clear days in contact with all parts of the Republic. It was a touching monument to their isolation. In answer to my question about its astounding height, Chuck (or Poppy) - as the father was interchangeably designated - said only that he liked "good reception."