The Purpose of Stories: To Entertain or To Teach?

The Purpose of Stories: To Entertain or To Teach?

This past week, I’ve immersed myself in developmental editing for my novel-in-progress, Age of Prophets—and since the double-spaced printed manuscript is 460-some pages, disappeared might be a more accurate verb than immersed. Among other recurring editorial issues,...
The Case for Reading Fairy Tales

The Case for Reading Fairy Tales

I’m a few weeks shy of twenty years old, and this is the first Valentine’s Day of my life that I haven’t been single. Most of those Valentine’s Days, I was perfectly content exchanging homemade valentines with my friends, but I won’t lie—those last several Valentine’s...
An Eager Air: In Defense of Metaphor

An Eager Air: In Defense of Metaphor

 This past week, I spent not one but two rather lengthy layovers in the Denver airport. Being the industrious person that I am, I decided to begin reading Hamlet (mostly in preparation for a college essay comparing the views of justice in Hamlet and the Oresteia, but...

Elantris (epic fantasy)

Genre: Epic fantasy (romantic subplot) Rating: 5/5 Elantris is not the first book I’ve read by Brandon Sanderson, but it just might be my favorite. Humor and wisdom collide in this sweeping story of a man’s struggle to find meaning in a world that considers him beyond...
Defining Literature: Literal Analysis (pt 2 of 5)

Defining Literature: Literal Analysis (pt 2 of 5)

What is literature? In the first blog post of this series, I offered the following definition of literature: “A book is literature if it invites readers to engage with it using the four levels of Biblical interpretation (literal, typological, moral, anagogical) in a...