I’m a long-time fan of Penelope Lively’s Booker-winning 1987 novel Moon Tiger.  In my first year teaching at Dalhousie, it was one of the novels I assigned in a seminar on women and historical writing (IIRC, I also assigned Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic — these details date me as much as the seminar!). I’ve read a number [...]

Once upon a time I had never read a “romance novel” — or so the story went. There’s a way in which that was absolutely true: I had never read anything marketed or labeled explicitly as a “romance novel” (a Harlequin, say). As with all literary labels, though, “romance” isn’t really that precise:all around the territory of [...]

Friday afternoon I filed the last of my final grades for 2012-13. Compared to the arduous work to be done at the end of last term, wrapping up this term hasn’t been as difficult, but it also hasn’t been quite as interesting. My last post dwelt on the perplexities of ‘coercive pedagogy.’ Marking exams last [...]

Monday was my last day of class meetings, and now I’ve moved into the exams-and-essays phase of the term. I have mixed feelings about both final exams and final essays, but for different reasons. Final essays can be triumphant culminations of a term’s work, the products of significant reflection and practice.  But they can also [...]

I’ve just wrapped up a couple of weeks of reading and discussing Carol Shields’s Unless with the students in my Intro class. I assigned it a bit on impulse: I wanted a reasonably contemporary Canadian novel on the syllabus, and I was also looking for a novel to pair with Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own — [...]

This month’s reading for the Slaves of Golconda group was Diana Athill’s briskly evocative memoir Stet, about her decades-long career in publishing. Other folks have been putting up their smart and detailed posts, and you should hop on over and read them if you haven’t visited already. Partly because I’m tired and busy, and partly because [...]