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Open Letters Monthly Archive Feature: Novel Readings by Rohan Maitzen
I decided to ease out of the summer with some light reading on this long weekend — first Honest Doubt, and then two Spensers, Early Autumn (one of the best of the series just for defining Spenser’s code, which is roughly “autonomy with honor”) and Hundred-Dollar Baby (notable for being a rare case in which Spenser’s knight-errantry fails […]
Read More“I know you said most professors aren’t given to murder, but are English departments more given to murder than most?” “Not as far as I know,” Kate said. Over the years I have read all of the Kate Fansler mysteries by Amanda Cross (who was really Columbia English professor and renowned feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun). Honest […]
Read MoreSeptember is here, which means that even though technically it’s still summer, it feels like fall. From now on, every nice day is to be cherished and even the sunniest Sunday will be under the shadow of Monday’s impending classes — though not quite yet, because my first class meetings of the new term aren’t until Wednesday. […]
Read MoreIt happens so gradually at first: there’s a slight chill in the evening air, the sky is a little darker on my morning run, the leaves look just a little less green. Then a faint hum begins on campus: more people are in their offices, the sidewalks are a bit more crowded, signs of arrivals […]
Read MoreOnly one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena–organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation. Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is such a good book — it is so beautiful, so terrible, so moving, so well-designed — that it feels ungenerous […]
Read MoreA great leap forward was made by the American Henry Ford, who started mass-producing cars. His strategy was to reduce the profit margin but increase the volume of production and sales. This was based on a simple conviction — that the employees of his own factory should be able to afford an automobile. And so […]
Read MoreI mentioned in my last post that I had recently read a new academic book that I ultimately decided not to review, partly because I didn’t want to scapegoat the author for my alienation from the genre it belongs to. I’m still not going to name it (and that’s my own book pictured at left, […]
Read MoreIt has been a while since I’ve posted, and also a while since I posted a reading roundup! The two things are related: because I haven’t been posting often, it might seem as if I haven’t been reading much, but I have — it’s just that much of my recent reading has been for reviews, […]
Read MoreSuch a peaceful, windless morning here for my seventieth birthday–the sea is pale blue, and although the field is still brown, it is dotted with daffodils at last. It has seemed an endless winter. But now at night the peepers are in full fettle, peeping away. And I was awakened by the cardinal, who is […]
Read MoreI’m reading To the Lighthouse for the first time. I know, I know. I also know that I should love it, because it is beautiful and moving and brilliant and original — and I sort of do, so far, except when I don’t. I am not a particularly good reader of Woolf’s fiction: it was only […]
Read More“But you’re making progress, showing the youngsters a thing or two.” “It feels like the end of a long song, though — men like Cafferty and Joe Stark . . . and me too, come to that . . . we’re on our last legs. Our way of doing things seems . . . I […]
Read More“The kind of man I am is not a suitable topic, you know. It’s not what one talks about.” “Why?” “Because it’s not.” “The code? A man doesn’t succumb to self-analysis? It’s weak? It’s womanish?” “It’s pointless. What I am is what I do. Finding the right words for it is no improvement. It isn’t […]
Read More“Well, really, don’t you know.” Wimsey screwed his monocle more firmly into his eye. “Really, old fellow, you make me feel all of a doo-dah, what?” Do you have books you reach for when you’re feeling low, books you just know will cheer you up? For me, Have His Carcase is a sure thing when I need […]
Read MoreSuch, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever bet written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. We all probably know the Woody Allen joke about speed-reading War and […]
Read MoreIt comes back to the geese, in the end. I hoped it would, because of all the marvellous episodes in Wart’s education (the tyrannical pike, the totalitarian ants, the philosophical badger), his time with the geese is the most sublime. It’s beautifully written, for one thing, detailed and evocative, freely fanciful: The sun, as it […]
Read MoreOur Souls at Night is the last of Kent Haruf’s Holt novels — he died not long before its publication. It seems fitting then, I suppose, that it is a bit bleaker than the other two I’ve read, a bit less optimistic about sustaining the kind of quiet humanity that it too holds out as our […]
Read MoreAs a doctor, I had had some sense of what patients with life-changing illnesses faced–and it was exactly these moments I had wanted to explore with them. Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it? […]
Read MoreOn university campuses we hear a lot about innovation these days, from hype about the latest ed-tech fad to proclamations by institutions like my own about fostering a “culture of innovation.” This has got me reflecting on how we define or recognize innovation — something that is not as obvious, I think, as its champions, […]
Read MoreI’m so glad Emma Claire Sweeney put me on the list to receive a review copy of her new novel Owl Song at Dawn. A heartfelt story about love and acceptance, it is also an evocative look at a time and place — northern England in the 1950s — in which, for families like those Sweeney […]
Read MoreIs there a name for books structured as backward explorations — books like Moon Tiger, say, or Old Filth, or Stegner’s Angle of Repose or The Spectator Bird, framed by aged protagonists’ desire (part nostalgic, part existential) to understand the story of their own lives? It’s a simple enough device, and at least in the examples I can […]
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