Thinking further about that question about addicting books, and what that means, it occurred to me that possibly for me it's something that I see not so much on the level of the individual book, as of the oeuvre of an author.
Because I have certainly had experience of that thing where I have binge-read through such works as were available to me of ( Read more... )

I was inspired by reading in Winifred Holtby as I Knew Her that WH, in her book about V Woolf pointed out that several characters from previous books by Woolf were at Mrs Dalloway's party -

Which totally delighted me as a result of thoughts I was having a couple of weeks ago that never became a post.

Which themselves were generated by reading a ( Read more... )

I'm not sure what to make of this piece by Sir Andrew Motion on sequels. He seems to be mostly talking about works by others set in a fictive universe created by someone else.

While I went off at a tangent and started to think what a sequel actually is when authors write their own.

Is a sequel something that develops from something in the original ( Read more... )

What I've been reading since my last reading roundup in early April (gulp). This may be rather synoptic.

( Sff )

I was musing about something I have remarked (in one of the Wiscon panels and in other places, possibly even in a post here) about reading the contemporary-set novels of Charlotte Yonge by treating them as an AU in which the premises of the narratives are true (this is after all not so very different from the skill of suspending one's disbelief ( Read more... )

(Shout-out to W H Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts)

This is sort of riffing further anent my peeves with litcrit pundits calling for writerz to Engage With Contemporary Issues, but in fact is about historical fiction vs fiction written in whatever historical period.

There are obvious vulgar errors in histfic - your sympathetic characters tend to have ( Read more... )

Crime-writers names their favourite authors/shamuses: yay for Paretsky naming Georgia Strangeways!

It's a pity that the Guardian's crime reviewer seems to think a tired old trope that probably got name-checked in the Detective Club's list of don't along with mysterious arrow poisons, is a new hot thing: 'amnesia is set fair to become the crime ( Read more... )

Because it feels like time to do one of these.

Read for review or research:
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: accounts of Victorian erotic experience (2003): quite good, perhaps not tremendously useful for my particular purposes (too much close reading of rather specific texts, not enough wider context), but was exceedingly good on ( Read more... )

I don't know whether there was one precipating event or a coincidental confluence of things, but people have been posting hither and yon about the assumption that anything that helps you deal with a physical or mental condition is a 'crutch', which the Truly Strong and Determined person will endeavour to do without.

As people have already commented ( Read more... )

The thing with these posts is, there is a point where I think, 'maybe I should do one', and I look at the log and it doesn't seem like that many books and then a while later I look and there are rather a lot since the last reading post...

( Litfic )