This book was recommended (loaned to me, in fact) by someone whose taste is very similar to mine. I've heard great things about it from others. Right off the bat, there are certain cool elements: the setting, the magical world secretly existing side-by-side with the mundane. And I have only read 4 chapters, which isn't a lot ( Read more... )

Gentleman and scholar steve_mollmann pointed me toward an article in the Times Literary Supplement this afternoon which he described as a brilliant act of literary detection. Having just finished reading it, I'd have to concur.

When Dickens met Dostoevsky by Eric Naiman It begins with the occasion, reported in several biographies of both men, when Dickens and ( Read more... )

Neil Gaiman is universally adored, right? So maybe discussing my discomfort about one of his works is kind of useless. But I want to talk about this, so I'm okay with talking to the airy vapors.

I'm reading -- well actually, listening on audiobook -- to one of his novels, Anansi Boys. The narrator does great voices. That, honestly, is the main ( Read more... )

Hi guys! I think you might enjoy tinuviellen's and my tribute to Pride and Prejudice and its many adaptations over at Wordpress!

I hope you can check it out, and also that you all get the chance to have a cup of tea and read a favorite passage or two from the novel today! Here's a few bits I like to start things off:

( Why I named my cat after Charles Bingley )

So I told myself I would take this whole weekend off, because the last six months have been so stressful and the last two especially so non-stop-worky-work. I was really psyched to just do nothing. Bliss. Of course it would be sheer bliss.

Right?

Well, as it turns out, it was a lot harder than I expected! First off, I tried to sleep in really ( Read more... )

You're all well-read people. Can you think of any examples of what one might call "literary novelization"? I've been reading a lot of adaptation theory and it's often mentioned that novelization - the writing of a book based on a film - gets little scholarly attention. Since intellectual types tend to say "the book is better," this is interesting, ( Read more... )

1) How old were you when you started reading classic literature? (Other than classics written for children.)

2) What were the first classic books you remember really appreciating? Do you remember your age when you read those particular books?

So... what would you guys consider to be absolutely classics (or deserve-to-be-classics) of the young adult literature* genre?

*(I'm not going to get hardcore with the definitions, but generally speaking I think a young adult novel isn't just any book a young adult might happen to read, but has some content relating to young adulthood, however ( Read more... )

I cannot strongly enough recommend the audiobook of Maryrose Wood's The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, Book 1: The Mysterious Howling. It's probably more fun if you avoid spoilers but suffice it to say, though a children's book it now has me and my parents as well as my 7-year-old niece thoroughly entranced. And I think at least 50% of the ( Read more... )

A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook a couple weeks ago and it's taken me all this time to get around to reading past the introduction, but I finally did and it's brilliant and I want to teach it now.

Lev Grossman, "Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology"* (TIME ( Read more... )