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Open Letters Monthly Archive Feature: Novel Readings by Rohan Maitzen
I began writing posts about my teaching plans and experiences because I thought it might contribute to demystifying our profession — and perhaps counteract, just a little bit, the way it is sometimes demonized (or ridiculed). I discovered after that first year that there were real benefits in this for me, and, not incidentally (if [...]
Read More“Plant Dreaming Deep has brought me many friends,” says May Sarton early in Journal of a Solitude, “…but I have begun to realize that, without my intention, that book gives a false view.” She worried that she had given an overly idealistic picture of her life alone in her restored New Hampshire farmhouse, which she describes [...]
Read MoreMy first classes of 2013-14 meet tomorrow morning: between that and the expectation that temperatures will drop into the single digits tonight, it’s clearly time to admit that summer is over — and along with it, Maddie and my annual summer reading project. (She exceeded her goal this year, so good for her!) Because blog [...]
Read MoreIt is a true story of love and sorrow, of faith and endurance . . . Sadly, there is tragedy. Yet there is redemption, too! And taekwondo! What would it be like to live in a world where it is better not to know what happened to someone you love — where lies becomes the [...]
Read MoreI really enjoyed Rose Tremain’s Restoration, which an excellent friend promptly posted to me when I needed a bit of cheering up. (Everyone should have a friend like that!) Not that Restoration is very cheerful, but a good novel is always a tonic, isn’t it? And Restoration is awfully good. Like Wolf Hall, it’s a historical novel that is less about [...]
Read MoreShe’s an ordinary woman leading a quiet life – no thrills, no romance, few expectations, just her work, her friends, and the comforting knowledge that everyone relies on her common sense. In a crisis, she can be counted on to make tea. All this changes when the new couple comes on the scene. The wife [...]
Read MoreI don’t teach creative writing classes or attend MFA workshops or writers’ conferences, so I have no first-hand experience of the lamentable species William Giraldi is so annoyed about in his recent essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books: wannabe writers with “no usable knowledge of literary tradition [who] are mostly mere weekend readers [...]
Read MoreAnd that was just the first book I read this weekend … I was right that David Copperfield not only gave me great pleasure while I was reading it but restored my flagging enthusiasm for reading more generally. I finished it over the weekend and loved almost every minute of it. The big setback for me is always [...]
Read MoreJudging from a few recent blog posts and twitter updates I’ve seen, a lot of us have fallen into reading slumps lately. I blame my own partly on a phase of duty reading: I was sampling books with an eye to assigning them for a course, which means a lot of them were books I [...]
Read MoreOne of the writing projects I’ll be turning to in the near future is a review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel, The Signature of All Things. I thought that made this an appropriate time to revisit her earlier work. I also wrote a bit about Committed, which I ended up not liking as much as Eat, Pray, Love. [...]
Read MoreI’ve just finished Cotillion, which is one of my favorite Georgette Heyer novels so far. Like The Grand Sophy (which was the one that helped me finally “get” why people enjoy Heyer so much), it’s laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s also very sweet. I was so pleased with the resolution to the romance plot, which turns on its [...]
Read MoreA wise man once told me that the introduction to my long-imagined book should represent “the passionate peroration you’d deliver verbally about ‘Why George Eliot?’ if it came up in intelligent company.” After drawing up my inventory of everything I’ve written about George Eliot over the years, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by [...]
Read MoreI was very restrained in Hager Books on my recent trip to Vancouver: I picked out a modest two books there. One, Gift from the Sea, I chose because I’d heard so much about it. The other, Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures, I chose for the opposite reason: I’d never heard of it at all! That may seem [...]
Read MoreIt’s not that I haven’t read anything except Gift From the Sea recently, though you might think so from the dearth of book blogging going on over here. If you peer at the summer reading tally on the right, you’ll see a few more titles on either side – but I haven’t written them up! Distraction, [...]
Read MoreA week or so ago I noted that among my remaining summer projects was thinking through “what kind of larger project could emerge from the essays I’ve been writing on George Eliot”: “Do they, could they, add up to something larger, perhaps some kind of cross-over book project?” is the question — and if so, [...]
Read MoreGift from the Sea is a book that enacts its own prescription … which is my attempt to sum up how this book about the difficulty, but also the inestimable value, of quiet meditation prompts its readers (or this reader, anyway) to just such inward contemplation. It’s a little book, and an easy one to [...]
Read MoreIt was just about three months ago that I reported having filed the grades for my winter term courses. In addition to the clean-up work that remains at that point, and the unfolding list of administrative business that encroaches especially in May, I mentioned a number of projects that I was going to be working [...]
Read MoreI’m back from my trip to Vancouver. Including travel days, I was on vacation for 11 days, making this the longest trip I’ve taken in ages. It was wonderful to spend so much time with my family and to meet up with so many of my friends — among them the wonderful Liz of Something [...]
Read MoreI 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 [...]
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