Dear Readers! I have written fewer than 20 blog posts in 365 days! That’s… kind of terrible?

Anyway! After my controlled rant about Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor*, I felt bad, for it seemed like I was being too negative, and all my reviews lately made the books sound awful, which they aren’t necessarily. OK, Tigana really is that bad ( Read more... )

Dear Readers! This is the end of my critical review of Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen (Harper 2013). Part One is HERE. Part Two is HERE.

( Click here to read this essay! )

In which I continue to review Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Part One is HERE.

( Click here to read this essay! )

Human beings tell stories, to entertain, to explore, and to define themselves. We class ourselves and others by comparing the narratives of the cultures we are part of, and deciding which assumptions of another’s culture are like or unlike our own. Every other person is an alien to us, their culture a foreign planet whose ways we can never fully ( Read more... )

Introduction

Paragraph the First, in which I begin with a tangent: We (and I can only speak for Americans here, though I think this is certainly true for all Western English-speaking nations, and many other nations as well, though perhaps in slightly different ways) live in a sick and twisted society.( Part One: Harry Was Just A Patsy )

Additions and corrections:

1. I totally forgot to make my point about Mansfield Park! The ladies get what they want even though the reader thinks it's bad for them! Fanny and the Misses Bertram get exactly what they want (at least temporarily in Maria's case), despite all objections from their family and society. I think the whole book is an ( Read more... )

Ahh...There is nothing so fine as sitting down on a Sunday morning, while the snow is pouring down outside and one has absolutely no known obligations* in the near future, to blog. ( Introduction, Forster, Austen, and Pre-Feminism )

...that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Northanger Abbey doesn't have so memorable an opening line, but it starts off in a very funny way, setting the tone instantly, as well as perfectly introducing the heroine Catherine Morland. Of her, we learn that she's a girl who plays cricket, is absolutely ordinary in ( Read more... )

Right, remember when I said something about how "reviews" and "writing theory" were different tags and the entries I used them on were written by different parts of my brain? Well, that's true, but...See, these may look like book reviews, but in fact, I'm using my feelings about these books to jump into writerly thoughts. Really. Sort of. ANYWAY. ( Read more... )