Themes & Projects 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
Melville read-through, part II, Moby-Dick—Billy Budd, July–September 2010
The Unstructured Clarel Readalong, August–September 2010
The Art of the Novella Challenge, August 2011
The bibliographing Reading Challenge, January 2011–present
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By nicole
I said in a comment on Monday that sometimes I’ve felt almost under a spell reading these D.H. Lawrence stories and novellas. My mood ends up somehow more open to his psychological flights, and I think at least part of it has to do with how well I feel he sets up the scene [...]
By nicole
I continued my recent D.H. Lawrence binge over the weekend with Daughters of the Vicar, a tiny novella about a poor but proud vicar’s family. All the early Lawrence stories I’ve been reading lately focus on contrasts, and this is no exception. Usually the contrasts are just between a man and a woman—“just,” ha!—but [...]
By nicole
When I wrote about D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox, I mentioned that Henry is “cunning, sly, shrewd, stealthy,” but I didn’t really explain about the repetition of descriptions like this throughout the story. But based on my recent reading of The Fox and the stories in Wintry Peacock (and failure to remember much of anything [...]
By nicole
The Sad Fortunes of the Revd Amos Barton was, according to its introduction, George Eliot’s “first work of narrative fiction”—a novella really, not a novel.
The Revd Amos Barton is the curate in a small English town, and as always a central feature of the small English town is its gossip. Gossip is one [...]
By nicole
I haven’t been totally keeping up with the Theory of Moral Sentiments book club, but I have been doing the reading bit at least. I’m through Part I.
Before even getting into the content, I have to say how much I was struck by what an enjoyable read it is. I suspect the appeal [...]
By nicole
The first scene of The Dud Avocado finds Sally Jay Gorce unexpectedly meeting an acquaintance from America, Larry Keevil, and having a drink with him at a café. He outlines for her the four types of tourists, which fall into two categories. We have:
The Organized
The Eager-Beaver-Culture-Vulture, who has “the list ten yards [...]
By nicole
Every once in a while a cover or a description of an NYRB title will put me off and make me think it’s not quite for me. I’d been hearing pretty good things around the internets about The Dud Avocado but I kept thinking, “The dud avocado?” Plus the whole, young American girl runs [...]
By nicole
What a hectic weekend! I feel like I spent the whole thing driving around, running errands, and socializing with the CP’s fam. It was completely fun but completely tiring. And then, instead of falling into do-nothing mode as soon as I could, I actually did all my tax prep stuff instead of waiting even [...]
By nicole
And I mean that literally. I don’t seem to have much good illness-reading lying around, so I’ve been watching movies and tooling around the internets.
Via MR, a post on measuring whether a classical composer is over- or undervalued. That’s a bit of a contentious way to word it, but check out the lists.
[...]
By nicole
I cannot deny that I am a bit of a sucker for attractive matching books—bonus points if they are small—so this weekend when I found myself wandering among the essays published by Prickly Paradigm Press a couple of them followed me home. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology was for me.
David Graeber presents in [...]
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"As is quite clear, the enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher."—Vladimir Nabokov
Currently Reading Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta
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