The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog has me thinking about the ways plausibility and realism aren’t necessarily that important in fiction.  Sometimes, with certain kinds of books, yes, they are important, as some books set up an expectation that the events they describe could possibly happen and the characters in them are [...]

Notes on reading

I just finished the biography of Jane Austen I’ve been working on for a while, and now I see another biography I need to read: Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. Given my mild obsession with that most intriguing writer, I think this is a book I need to read.
And here’s another biography I’ll [...]

Gaudy Night

My mystery book group had another fabulous meeting this past Sunday to discuss Dorothy Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night.  I can’t recommend highly enough having a specific theme or genre for your book group; I have limited experience with book groups I’ll admit, but with this one, having a focus has made the discussions so rich [...]

Bel Canto

What a marvelous book Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto is! It’s so marvelous I talked one of my book groups into reading it next.  What strikes me most about this book is the way a description of its plot captures absolutely nothing of the feeling of reading it.  It’s a book that has hostages and terrorists, [...]

Book Chat

This semester I teach Tuesday afternoon and on into the evening until 8:30 and then again on Wednesday morning (and I teach Monday and Thursday, too, but those days are easier), and I’m realizing today just how taxing that schedule can be.  So far this semester I haven’t actually had to teach a full week [...]

Not Really About Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry

I’m trying to warn you that this post says very little about Winterson’s book Sexing the Cherry, so if you want a discussion of the actual book, as opposed to an analysis of my feelings about it, I would check out the posts over at the Slaves of Golconda blog.  There is just something about [...]

Monday or Tuesday

First of all, the dramatic reading of Edna O’Brien’s play about Virginia Woolf was very enjoyable.  It took place in a little theater in the basement below the Drama Bookshop, and I got to chat with some students who are in the grad program I graduated from.  Anne Fernald started off the program by reading [...]

Two reviews

First of all — yay for President Barack Obama!  I watched the inauguration at school with a crowd of faculty and students, and it was exciting.  It’s amazing how much optimism I see and feel out there, and it’s wonderful to have something to feel hopeful about and proud of.  I thought his speech was [...]

The Assistant

Many thanks for all the well-wishes offered in response to my existential crisis post — I find your comments very comforting!  True to my nature, I suppose, instead of going to see the upbeat Slumdog Millionaire today, I chose instead to see the much more serious and sad Doubt.  But it was a wonderful [...]

Sherlock Holmes

My mystery book group read two Arthur Conan Doyle novellas for its last meeting: A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.  I think I read some Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid because I remember the volume my father owned, and I remember  pulling it down off the shelves and reading at [...]

Everything Passes

I’m a bit behind on my reviews, which is odd for me, as I don’t usually read enough to have trouble writing about everything I read, in one form or another.  Part of the problem, though, is that I need to write about Gabriel Josipovici’s extremely short novel Everything Passes, and I find myself at [...]

Lady Audley’s Secret

I finished Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret and felt that I had enjoyed every minute of it.  I described it to someone as trashy Victorian fiction, but that description can too easily be misleading — the book is an example of Victorian sensational fiction, dealing with deception, bigamy, madness and a [...]

The Savage Garden

Mark Mills’s novel The Savage Garden is an entertaining comfort read, the sort of book that you don’t have to take seriously and one that can help you while away a cold winter evening (or a hot summer afternoon, or whatever).  I wrote on Litlove’s blog recently that all I ask from comfort reading is [...]

Creativity

I was struck by a passage in The Recognitions about art and religion (p. 34 in the Penguin edition).  Can you imagine if you were a child and took your first drawing to your aunt with whom you live and who is doing most of the work to raise you, only to get this response?
Don’t [...]

Beginning Gaddis

I am an entire 26 pages into Gaddis’s 950-page novel, and I thought I’d let you know how it’s going so far.  So far, so good.  I can tell it will be a slow read, but that’s okay — slow reading seems to be the thing these days anyway.  The story (as much of it [...]

The Winner of Sorrow

Brian Lynch’s novel The Winner of Sorrow (kindly sent to me as an ARC from Dalkey Archive Press) was originally published in 2005 in Ireland, and is now going to be released in the U.S. this coming February. It’s a fictional retelling of the life of William Cowper (pronounced Cooper), an eighteenth-century British poet.  [...]

Notes for a Friday

I hope everybody who celebrates Thanksgiving had a great day!  And I hope everyone who doesn’t had a great day too!  Hobgoblin and I stayed home, as we usually do, and celebrated Thanksgiving all on our own, with a little help from Muttboy, who really, really likes the Cornish game hens Hobgoblin cooked up (as [...]

The Eustace Diamonds

I’m never going to be a huge, huge Trollope fan — George Eliot will probably always remain my favorite Victorian novelist — but I’m very glad there are all those Trollope novels out there for when I’m in the mood for a good long story.  Sometimes I want nothing more than to immerse myself in [...]

Hot Water

I finished listening to P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Hot Water the other day and became further convinced that listening to a book is fundamentally different than reading it, because while I loved listening to this book, I’m not sure I would have liked it any other way.  Perhaps this is because Hot Water is not Wodehouse’s [...]

Book Notes

Litlove is tempting me to read William Gaddis’s The Recognitions with her and any others who are interested.  I’ve had this book on hand for a while now but have felt a bit too apprehensive about its difficulty to start it.  It’s long, which is not a problem, but when I start hearing about its [...]