What I read

Well, I finally came to the end of Mary Shelley, and it is a good solidly researched biography (even if a pedantic medical historian noted an error in the dating of when the connection was made between cholera and the water-supply and therefore upgrading of the sewers), and on Mary's side without being unduly hagiographic, but really, ( Read more... )

Quite bombarded with texts and emails from NHS and my GP apropos of this year's round of flu jab and Covid booster - I'd originally booked my flu shot for this morning and then got a text from my GP offering the booster and possibility of concurrent flu shot this pm, so canceled the first appointment and boogeyed on down to the health centre this ( Read more... )

On the one hand, there was some bloke saying that if you're not into the book after 20 pages, you should hurl it at the wall -
- and on the other hand, there was someone, and it was on Twitter and one cannot always be sure what the user name signifies and I'm not even sure if I saw the initial tweet that kicked the debate off, but this sort of ( Read more... )

We're not here to have fun, we're here to improve ourselves, to upskill our skills, to be, dare we say it, pompous superior bores? How to Read a Book at Higher Order Reading Skill Level. Total immersion is how you learn from great authors
It's all about great books: mak[ing] you wiser and improv[ing] your self-knowledge. It can also open ( Read more... )

I see this actually dates back some years, but my flabber is still ghasted: It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love: "Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men."
('Literary girls': shudder.)
Ummm: over a long and misspent life - misspent, I may add, reading ALOT, we have ( Read more... )

But when I read, I read to read the book I'm reading. It's not a performative act...
I’ve always loved reading where people can watch me read. (And not to get me started on all those rom-com visions, because I have visions of someone coming up with intrusive queries of 'is that a good book?' or mansplaining why I should/should not be reading it or ( Read more... )

I encountered this article this morning via Twitter:
I can’t stand the earnest worship of books as objects - it’s literary posturing of the first degree.
I mean, there is some 'sharp young columnist' posturing itself going on there -
- but I really don't think that one can jump from what she's actually saying, which is, more or less, mostly ( Read more... )

At this rather gloomy time of the year, I was rather charmed to open the latest issue of Literary Review, which can be rather uneven, and has, indeed, something in the way of form for ponceyness and higher codswallop in the opening 'Diary' page, which tends to be by very various hands.
But this month, Philip Hensher comes good in praise of ( Read more... )

But somehow it makes me a bit twitchy?
Without women the novel would die.
I mean, it's really odd to write a piece about the long history of dissing on a) the novel and b) women reading and c) the kinds of novels women read without citing Jane Austen on 'o, it is only a novel' and Virginia Woolf on sneering at novels which are about women in ( Read more... )

Who is this guy, and why is he arguing from his own anomie vis-a-vis the novel (and maybe half-a-dozen mates he spoke to in some hipster hangout or other the other week) to make this A Big General Point?
I stopped reading novels last year. I think you did too.
Solipsism much: 'My primary evidence for the death of the reader is the death of my own ( Read more... )