Well, it’s been a busy holiday weekend and I’m exhausted. After Thanksgiving with the not-in-laws, I moved house, into a different unit in the same building. I have to say, this was by far the easiest move I have ever done, and I normally consider moving to be the closest we get to experiencing [...]
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Mysteries, December 2008–January 2009
Maritime literature, January–March 2009 Melville read-through, part I, Typee—White-Jacket, December 2009–January 2010 Whirlwind tour of Russian literature, February–May 2010 Epistolary literature, July 2009–June 2010
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I said yesterday that Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica was the best book I had read about children in ages; I think, in fact, it may be the best book I have ever read about children. Its exploration of their psychology is certainly deep and affecting. It begins in Jamaica, where the [...] At A Different Stripe, a lovely excerpt from Sunflower, which I reviewed back in October. I loved the passage they quote. The pirates in A High Wind in Jamaica are pretty wonderful. After finishing the novel I went back and re-read Francine Prose’s introduction to the NYRB edition, and she doesn’t like them quite as much. But why? Captain Jonsen’s drunken display of murky attention leads Emily to defend herself by biting his thumb, and [...] The other night a friend mentioned in an email that she considered her brother a “secret reader”—someone who seems like a nonreader but turns out not to be; someone who has read the book under discussion but doesn’t say anything about it, tacitly pretending to be out of the loop; someone who is (at [...] Last week I was pleased to note that Joe Queenan thinks there are too many overly positive book reviews out there, and last night via Tyler Cowen I find this, by Peter Suderman: …the critical medium that suffers most [from overly positive reviews] is pop music criticism, which skews toward generally positive reviews of [...] It’s been a pretty good reading week—the new Malcolm Gladwell and a gorgeous book on the history of color. A hectic week too, though, and what with Thanksgiving and time off work this one will only be more so—how does having time off work make me feel so much busier? Hopefully in between my [...] Black: The History of a Color looks remarkably like a coffee table book—large format hardcover; gorgeous color reproductions of paintings, sculptures, engravings; nice layouts—but don’t be fooled. The text is not just for flipping through. Michel Pastoureau, who previously wrote Blue: The History of a Color, explains at the beginning that he is not [...] Last week, via The Book Lady’s Blog, I heard about a bit of a blog dust-up over the whole business of bad reviews, the unfairness of bad reviews when the blogger has gotten a free book, authors complaining about bad reviews, etc. (Much of this discussion seems to have disappeared from the internets?) Then [...] I really like his review—even though it’s much more critical than mine. The book is getting snarky reviews but if it were by an unknown, rather than by the famous Malcolm Gladwell, many people would be saying how interesting it is. The main point, in economic language, is that human talent is heterogeneous and [...] |
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