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287 reviews for:
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Toni Morrison
4.33 AVERAGE
287 reviews for:
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Toni Morrison
4.33 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This is a collection of essays/speeches/etc from Morrison. Lots of great ones in here but some feel a bit redundant (some similar points are made in some essays where you can tell those essays were written for different audiences therefore not really meant to be read together).
Her essays Racism and Fascism feels especially relevant today. Overall, I would not recommend to read this all the way through unless you are familiar with at least a few of her books. She writes some great reflection and analysis in these essays and talks a lot about the process of writing these books. I think the process essays would be valuable to any aspiring writer. I came to a new appreciation to Jazz, Beloved, and the Bluest Eye from these essays. Also, Paradise is my favorite and less written about so I was gobbling up every essay related to that book. I think you can definitely pick and choose essays to read from, especially if you are not familiar with a lot of her work.
Her essays Racism and Fascism feels especially relevant today. Overall, I would not recommend to read this all the way through unless you are familiar with at least a few of her books. She writes some great reflection and analysis in these essays and talks a lot about the process of writing these books. I think the process essays would be valuable to any aspiring writer. I came to a new appreciation to Jazz, Beloved, and the Bluest Eye from these essays. Also, Paradise is my favorite and less written about so I was gobbling up every essay related to that book. I think you can definitely pick and choose essays to read from, especially if you are not familiar with a lot of her work.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I’m recommending this for any and all fans of Toni Morrison. This collection provides so much insight on how she crafted her characters and developed her stories. There are discussions about her time as an editor which I found very interesting.
It was a bit repetitive at times and more than a few times, Ms. Toni just went completely over my head. I’d specifically like to take a class on her essay, Grendel and His Mother, as well as the titular paper, The Source of Self-Regard, because I don’t always find her work to be the best to study, autodidactically.
If it was ever not clear to me before, it’s undeniable here, Toni Morrison was a treasure to the literary world and we are all better for her having embraced her gift as a writer.
Thank you to Vintage Books for the gifted copy!
It was a bit repetitive at times and more than a few times, Ms. Toni just went completely over my head. I’d specifically like to take a class on her essay, Grendel and His Mother, as well as the titular paper, The Source of Self-Regard, because I don’t always find her work to be the best to study, autodidactically.
If it was ever not clear to me before, it’s undeniable here, Toni Morrison was a treasure to the literary world and we are all better for her having embraced her gift as a writer.
Thank you to Vintage Books for the gifted copy!
A beautiful look into the ideas and wisdom of one of the greats. A collection of words I will revisit.
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
This collection of Toni Morrison speeches and essays affirms her as not merely the greatest American novelist since Faulkner but our finest moral intellectual since James Baldwin. There are works here that could stand tall alongside her fiction: her Nobel speech is itself a short story that allegorizes the role of literature and contains not one but two plot twists, and her lecture on the diversification of the canon that spirals into a treatise for the deliberate obfuscations of blacks in American literature and results in stunning reads of Huckbleberry Finn and Moby Dick before ending with a close reading of her novels' first sentences to unpack her entire framing for each book is one of the great works of literary criticism. There are a great many repeated passages throughout, no doubt due to Morrison recycling bits she found particularly pertinent while giving numerous speeches around the same time, but even these take on the musical quality of Morrison's fiction prose, refrains that gain power from their recurrence throughout the book.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Oh how many fine essays there are here. The one on Harriet Tubman's bid for her Civil War pension so good and then to see that she was 75 when it was finally approved, and the laughter of that final line that they likely thought she wouldn't live long, but she outfoxed them and lived into her 90s!
Toni Morrison is so good at grabbing interest thru a turn of things.
I so enjoyed the varied essays here.
Toni Morrison is so good at grabbing interest thru a turn of things.
I so enjoyed the varied essays here.