A Blog on Books

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood ended up being one of the most surprising and engaging reading experiences I’ve had in a while—and it’s a reminder of why going into a book with an open mind is so important. When this book was assigned for an English class I took last semester, I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. By the time we got to The Handmaid’s Tale , I was still wrapping up the previous reading and hadn’t yet started it. The class discussions had already begun, and hearing everyone talk about the book without having read it made it hard to connect. The conversations themselves didn’t help much either—they felt predictable and surface-level, mostly revolving around modern politics and women's rights. These are obviously important topics, but the way they were being discussed felt like something I’d already heard many times before in previous English classes. At that point, I hadn’t cracked open the book, so I wasn’t giving it a fair chance. Eventually, I caught up and...