Okay, I do not think my thorts upon Big Meaningful Books will ever entirely mesh with the thorts of Robert McCrum:
How I chose my list of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.
(And, may I remark upon the overwheening arrogance of 'for all time', because, really, what constitutes 'the best' is going to be so historically contingent, and he ( Read more... )

And while I am all about let's have some Dorothy Parker love, I'm not sure this essay really does her any favours:
The wicked wit and enigma of Dorothy Parker - 50 years on
Enquiring minds wonder, was she in fact the only woman at the famed Algonquin Round Table? Not according to the Wikipedia entry, which suggests that the author of that column is ( Read more... )

I might say, shooting's too good for them.
Devon student guilty of planting homemade bomb on London tube.
Well, okay, not shooting, but if somebody put something that was 'only' a prank bomb on a Tube train “for a bit of fun” I would throw the book at them, even if the evidence did not, as it does, suggest that the item in question could have ( Read more... )

Dept of, Utopian Dreams:
I bet the inhabitants holiday in San Serriffe: Let’s move to Framplington, Suffolk.
Essex has a radical past as the cradle of British modernism.
Dept of, Unsung Heroes (and Heroines):
Indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world.
Dept of, Attempts at Recovery:
I am pretty sure I have seen earlier attempts ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Battle for Bittora - I was a bit *sigh* that the romance went the way it did, and I thought the ending was a bit, well, rather late in the day for her to have that epiphany. Not sure the elements meshed very happily, in all.
Elizabeth Gill (not, I may say, the currently alive novelist of that name who pops up in the GoodReads ( Read more... )

The London Review of Books Bookshop Blog: The [Hypothetical] Booker Prize Winners, 1900-1968.
And I think, firstly, that if you are judging by present-day Booker criteria, how often, if ever, have you seen books that are funny, or genre, making the cut even on to the short list? I yield to none in my admiration for works such as The Pursuit of Love ( Read more... )

Was reading Ursula Le Guin letting her peeves off the leash on the topic of genre in Words Are My Matter, and how literary realist fiction is considered literature and all one wonderful thing.
Whereas, I thought, in fact litfic is a genre and I think it has - or certain types of litfic do - actual generic conventions.
And thinking about what Le ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Doctor DOA - whoa, cliffhanger!
Ruth Rendell, Dark Corners (2015) - I have just never been madly keen on Rendell writing as Rendell but one-off non-Wexford novels - I can see that they are good, and well-written and so on, but they just don't really do it for me. This was okay. Just about everybody is nasty, though mostly in ( Read more... )

Clearing out some tabs and links:
Ursula K. Le Guin: A rant about “technology”: the key to what it's about are those scare-quotes around 'technology': what people think they mean when they say technology.
***
With reference to a conversation elsewhere about convalescence - a lost phenomenon: a blogpost concerning the role played by convalescence in ( Read more... )

What I read
D E Stevenson, Miss Buncle Married (1936) - Persephone edition, picked up in Oxfam, where somebody had apparently been doing a clearout of their Persephones. Pleasant.
Patricia Wentworth, Silence in Court (1945) - another freebie from Dean Street Press. A standalone (Wentworth is best known for her Miss Silver series - Miss Silver, as I ( Read more... )