Short Saturday: Literature in the Vernacular
Quickly: can you name the literature from which these dozen phrases originate? Bah! Humbug! Old sport. Big Brother is watching you. The old ultra-violence. So it goes. Constant vigilance! All that...
View ArticleThe Bonus Round (2013 Edition)
I’ve been publishing a recap, every January, of every book mentioned in posts during the past year. (Except—whoops—I missed January this year. But maybe you did too? Man, that month went by fast!) Mind...
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Short Saturday: I Heart an Independent Press
Some years ago I had a favorite little bookstore in a city I traveled to regularly for business, and the man who owned it handsold* me Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons within weeks of its release. I loved...
View ArticleShort Saturday: On Metaphor
The kind of metaphor I most delight in … estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling of...
View ArticleShort Saturday: The Power of a Novel
I remember reading about the fatwa (Islamic legal opinion; in this case, a death sentence) levied against Salman Rushdie when his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 in Britain. For...
View ArticleJeepers Creepers, Where’d You Get … That Title?
A while back one of my readers* wondered how I felt about book titles. Specifically—ahem—pretentious book titles. It struck me as an interesting idea. I mean, how have we gone from Pride and Prejudice...
View ArticleReading: It Does a Mind Good (An Update*)
It’s still summer—hot enough for y’all?—and I’m still working on some fantastic new blog posts. In the meantime, I want to revisit my archives and bring some new information to your attention. Let’s...
View ArticleShort Saturday: A Sense of Place
I’ve been reading nonfiction all year and one of my favorites so far is Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf from LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading.* (And by the way, here is a delightful review of the...
View ArticleI Sing the English Teacher Electric*
In one week, two articles about the teaching of “English”—the word we speakers of English give, rather incorrectly, to both the reading of literature and the written construction of it—cross my path,...
View ArticleWomen, Men, Readers, Me (Gender in Fiction 1/4)
I was exposed to the gender politics of reading when I first entered publishing; I worked in the kids’ division. “Girls will read stories about girls or boys,” my boss said. “Boys won’t read stories...
View ArticleIt’s Hard to Catch Up When You Start Out Behind (Gender in Fiction 3/4)
I’m still grappling with gender issues in fiction. You’ll have seen I hadn’t even thought about the fact that there was a gender divide until I discovered in a personal way that many men don’t read...
View ArticleThe Androgynous Mind (Gender in Fiction 4/4)
When I started looking into the issues of gender—specifically women—in the publishing industry, I was blissfully serene about them. Which is to say, I thought we were past all that. I’m of the...
View ArticleStudy This: The Children Act
You’ve heard me say, over and over, that reading will make you a better writer. It will. And I’m just talking about reading for pleasure and absorbing things by osmosis that will show up unbidden in...
View ArticleThe Bonus Round (2014 Edition)
I’ve been publishing a recap, every January (or February!), of every book mentioned in posts during the past year. It’s just a list of of books I talked about last year, here on the blog, and I present...
View ArticleStudy This: I’ll Give You the Sun
Here’s another in my Study This series about intentional reading—that is, novels you writers will read for pleasure (always pleasure!) but also to study. To deconstruct. To have a look at how the...
View ArticleThe Great Irish Lit Wallow
What is it about the Irish? That they are a nation of storytellers seems to be borne out the minute you get in a cab in Dublin (though it probably helps that you have an American accent), but the fact...
View ArticleI’m a Fan of Books, So Are You, and It’s All Good
One meaning of the word fan, according to my fave dictionary, is “an enthusiastic devotee of a sport (as baseball) or diversion (as ballet) usually as a spectator rather than a participant” and/or “an...
View ArticleShort Saturday: Best Seller Versus Literary Staying Power
I’ve had more than one occasion to look up best-seller lists from decades past, often when I’m researching for this blog. I’ve read my share of books (and my mother read a lot before me, so those books...
View ArticlePersonal Archeology: I Remember It Well
Have you ever bought a used book and found something interesting inside? I don’t mean the inscription inside the front cover (another post for another time) … I mean the ephemera. (Merriam Webster:...
View Article#WhatImReadingNow: Stoner
Two weeks after that conversation Stoner received a memo from Lomax’s office which informed him that his schedule for the next semester was changed, that he would teach his old graduate seminar on the...
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