On Vacation June 2013 – Back Soon!
/
“The value of appreciation“: Harrison Solow, Felicity & Barbara Pym
/I missed Barbara Pym Reading Week by just a bit. I have been keen to read more Pym and serendipitously picked up a couple of Pym’s novels at a book sale just in time for it (The Sweet Dove Died and A Few Green Leaves). And I ordered Harrison Solow’s Felicity & Barbara Pym, which arrived on [...]
Read MoreThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: The Crème de la Crème?
/I’ve finally read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: that’s one more potential “Humiliation” winner gone! I very much enjoyed reading this novel. And yet I felt as if I understood better what it was about than why it was written as it was. Miss Jean Brodie is a fabulous character, as charismatic as a creation as she [...]
Read MoreRereading Dick Francis: the Top Ten!
/As previously reported, I have been binge-reading Dick Francis in service of an essay project that is steadily, if a bit stumblingly, heading towards completion. One question I’ve been asked pretty often when I mention that I’m doing this is “Which Dick Francis novels are your favorites?” A variation on this is “If I haven’t [...]
Read MoreMiddlemarch for Book Clubs: The Beta Launch
/Just over a year ago, I got somewhat exercised over a news story claiming that Middlemarch is the kiss of death for book clubs. My annoyance was exacerbated by the number of links it got from other sources, which added up to quite the anti-Middlemarch buzz for a while. My first response was a post on this [...]
Read More“This blurred world”: Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek
/Elizabeth Taylor is the first repeat author we’ve chosen in my F2F book club: for our last meeting, we read Angel, which was such a surprise hit we agreed we’d like to try more of Taylor’s novels. By “surprise hit” I mean in part that because we had no expectations, we were surprised to find ourselves [...]
Read MoreHow human! Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
/Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s singular classic The Leopard is the latest book for the Slaves of Golconda reading group. Three other readers have already posted their thoughts, and having read their interesting remarks I find myself wondering what I have to add! They’ve all mentioned aspects of the book that I was also interested in. Alex, for instance, stresses [...]
Read MoreBlogging: Accept No Substitutes!
/Some time ago (two years, to be precise — where does the time go?!), I wrote a testy post about some things Leonard Cassuto said about blogging in an online discussion about academic publishing. One of my chief complaints was that he threw “a veil of pragmatism” over “an argument for accepting (even reinforcing) the status [...]
Read More
