A Better Book Club

1. What sort of social and cultural setting does the Tallis house create for the novel? What is the mood of the house, as described in chapter 12? What emotions and impulses are being acted upon or repressed by its inhabitants? How does the careful attention to detail affect the pace of Part One, and what is the effect of the acceleration of plot events as it nears its end? 2. A passion for order, a lively imagination, and a desire for attention seem to be Briony's strongest traits. In what ways is she still a child? Is her narcissism—her inability to see things from any point of view but her own—unusual in a thirteen-year-old? Why does the scene she witnesses at the fountain change her whole perspective on writing? What is the significance of the passage in which she realizes she needs to work from the idea that "other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value" [p. 38]? Do her actions be...

Is Pablo opposed to blowing the bridge because he is a coward, as Pilar says, or is Pablo, himself, correct when he says he "has a tactical sense"? Why does Jordan agree with Pablo's reference to "the seriousness of this" (p. 54)? Is Agustín correct when he calls Pablo "very smart" (p. 94)?   Was the communist effort to eliminate God successful? What does Anselmo's view of killing suggest about the limitations of dogma? What does he mean when he says of the bridge sentries, "It is only orders that come between us" (pp. 192-193)? What is implied when Anselmo says soldiers should atone and cleanse themselves after the war? The book begins and ends with the same image of Robert Jordan lying on the forest floor. Some argue that this establishes an underlying circularity in the book. In what ways might the book be circular? It's become increasingly popular for feminist scholars to hate on Hemingway for creating shallow, formulaic, an...

The Secret Lives of Colors by Kassia St. Clair "Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precisie universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream" page 27. First of all....ROLE CALL: what is your favorite color! 1. On PRISMS and Newton...and his eye dagger. FUN* (*incredibly disturbing) FACT ALERT! When Newton was 24 he discovered that the color spectrum is contained within white light. YAY! When he was 23, sent home from college because of an outbreak of the plague, he spent that time sticking  a bodkin - this small dagger - into his eye.  BOO! Newton was famously interested in optics and the nature of light.  However, he was also interested in the visual stimulus, and the physiological processes by which objective reality is perceived by us. So, to address this question, Sir Isaac Newton though...