Category Archives: Reading Notes

How then must we live, reader, and who do you love?

Update: Martin Amis, in an interview with Emma Brockes in The Guardian on September 16, 1917:  Now in their temporary residence, work continues. Even here, Amis notices he has mellowed somewhat. He used to be a terrible purist about the … Continue reading

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Middlebrow furrowed

Meredith Jaffe, writing in the Guardian (11/4/15), asks: “Middlebrow? What’s so shameful about writing a book and hoping it sells well?” Reading a recent essay in the Sydney Review of Books, she says, “it’s difficult to work out who its … Continue reading

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Today’s word, from A.Word.A.Day, which is doing words from Dutch this week, is sooterkin. The second meaning seemed not to make sense (“get” an afterbirth?): 2. An afterbirth formerly believed to be gotten by Dutch women by warming themselves on … Continue reading

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It’s complicated

In the New York Times Book Review‘s “Bookends” of August 25 two sharp critical thinkers, Zoë Heller & Leslie Jamison, talk about the value, or overvaluing, of difficulty in literature. Heller made this observation about the new, & newly fraught, … Continue reading

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The Orphan Master’s Son

There are so many books I have to read–for work, research, reviewing–that I tend to get a lot of extracurricular works on the fly, in audio form, that is, taken in while I walk or run or drive (or putter … Continue reading

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