I am so in concurrence with this:
Reading a book you hate? Stop right now. Life is too short to indulge in things that do not give a great return on your energy, emotion or time.
I was going to say, there is no book shortage, but I suppose there are circumstances in which this might be the case - but I would say, give up on the thing you are not ( Read more... )

Because when I see a list of 12 books to entertain, challenge and inspire if you’re confined at home due to Covid-19.
And no 2 on the list is Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain????!!!!
Life is too short even without a raging pandemic is all I'm saying.
Okay, I daresay that people do think that being in isolation is a great chance to get stuck in on ( Read more... )

Only dipping my toes into FB and Twitter of late. Not sure if this is the reason I do not find so many things that trigger off into DW posts, or whether, no, I'm just in a meh frame of mind.
Or maybe it's just that my attention is Elsewhere (Elsewhen?).
The meh frame of mind theory gets some support from having come across a list of 60 books by ( Read more... )

George Eliot’s sprawling tale of provincial life has triumphed in BBC Culture’s poll of the greatest British novels as voted by the rest of the world.
It's actually a brilliantly structured novel - no 'loose baggy monster' of Jamesian disparagement.
('She wrote it - but it's a sprawling tale, because that's what happens when gurlyz move away from ( Read more... )

This time it's Books You'll Never Brag About Having Read.
I'm not saying I'd precisely brag about having read some of the popular-bestseller, bonkbuster, S&F, etc etc fiction I have consumed over the years (and looking at that list I think there are generational aspects and people who have read Twilight are unlikely to have read Peyton Place*), but ( Read more... )

That end of year list meme.
( In case you don't want to read a long list, much of which goes 'n/a' )

I will concede that it is probably never a good idea to click on the links in those spam emails that Abebooks send one, and that one can't automatically ditch in the Junk folder because one does sometimes buy books from them.
50 Classic Books & Why You Should Read Them
All of 4 of them by women, and 3 of those are beloved children's classics (but ( Read more... )

I really think more could be made of this, but it is a slight movement in the right direction when an article on loneliness among the relatively young can say:
using technology to help you meet new people can be beneficial. And if for whatever reason you are unable to venture outside, the internet can bring solace. Mumsnet has been "an absolute ( Read more... )

Fascinating list of 100 Best Novelz EVAH as published in 1898 in The Bookman by litcritic Clement Shorter.

And apart from the usual thing with such lists that it includes significant numbers of works which have not stood up to the test of time, there are several other interesting points about it.

The earlier entries are pretty much Ye Canonical ( Read more... )

The Women's Press SF list meme.

When the Women's Press first started its sf list - around the 1980s? - I was quite sniffy as I had acquired rather a lot of their titles already by various means: largely, no doubt, from a privileged position of living in a city that had SF import bookshops.

I also became quite sniffy about the original stuff they ( Read more... )