Tales from the Reading Room
Tales from the Reading Room Recent Blog Posts
The Blogging Workshop
on Oct 25, 2009 in Blogging Books Life events Publishing Writers Writing So, yesterday saw me heading into town for a literary day at the college of my dear friend, Rosy Thornton. A number of talks and workshops had been organized and we were heading up a session on online writing resources, which promised to be fun. It w...
Reading Lolita
on Oct 23, 2009 in Books Literature Reading Review Writers What a garish, ugly, sardonic book this is, and yet it does grip in some unhealthy way. It is, however, the perfect book for critical commentary. It was hard to settle on a passage, as just about any would do, but I picked an almost unobtrusive one s...
The Perils of Teaching
on Oct 21, 2009 in Higher Education Life events Personal Teaching This year, I was asked by one of my colleagues if I could give her students a seminar on essay writing. She teaches history and SPS – Social and Political Sciences to give it its proper name, or silly, pointless studies as it tends to be informally...
Real-Time Book Blogging!
on Oct 18, 2009 in Blogging Books Literature Reading Review Theory Thoughts 4.02 pm. This week I have received not one, but two copies of Robert Rowland Smith’s book of popular philosophy, Breakfast with Socrates. So I thought I’d better have a look at it. And it occurred to me it might be entertaining to read the openin...
How To Be A Star
on Oct 16, 2009 in Books Family Literature Reading Review About a year ago, my husband was sitting quietly reading the newspapers one weekend when he suddenly exclaimed, ‘Good Lord, my cousin has written a book!’ Now, you should know that he comes from a very large family – he has about 27 cousins in...
On William Dean Howells
on Oct 13, 2009 in Books Literature Reading Review William Dean Howells was one of the stalwart gentlemen of American 19th century letters. Best friends with Mark Twain and Henry James, a champion of the work of Emily Dickenson and Stephen Crane among others, he was a wholly self-educated man who beg...