Jason Steadman is a man with a big voice, an irresistible laugh, a book collection that makes me jealous, a brain that makes me simultaneously nervous and inspired, and he’s King of the Nerds. I have sworn my allegiance to him for the duration of both our lifetimes, as should you. He is a powerful…
Month: March 2013
Youth, beauty, and cereal for dinner
It’s almost April, and I have read only ten books this year. If you find me wandering around looking distressed and slightly disheveled, it’s because I’m wondering how this could have happened. I’m on track to read 40 books this year, if I’m lucky, when once I used to boast of 100 or more! I…
Anthony Trollope mails it in
Anthony Trollope is known for many things: he (appropriately) invented those handy red postal boxes, so we could all mail it in when necessary; he wrote almost 50 novels in his lifetime; he worked full-time for the British post office while writing all those books; he penned an autobiography that consigned him to the hell…
Without prospect or hope of reward save the permission to eat and sleep
George Gissing’s The Nether World is a nightmare of naturalistic realism. Or realistic naturalism. In any case, it a deeply pessimistic novel, a deeply pained story of a variety of characters for whom inborn nobleness, goodness, generosity, and intelligence offer no recourse from being born on the wrong side of the class line. It almost…
Brussels sprouts: redemption and reconciliation
As a child of the 70s and 80s, as a child of the east coast, as a child of people who thought vegetables grew conveniently in either cans or freezer bags, there was no threat more terror-inducing, no promise more likely to inspire nausea, than Brussels sprouts being served for dinner. Before circa 2010, I…
I actually don’t yearn particularly to know Natalie Portman, or, Evelyn Waugh may sparkle but he doesn’t shine
I’m all held up in my blogging, especially my book-reviewing, by a number of uninteresting but nonetheless very real and time-consuming life things. But I’m stuck, quiet and irritated, most of all because of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I read it, I’m sure, more than a month ago. It was so good that I spent…
Writing in books: an incomplete manifesto
I posted recently about missing having constant access to university libraries. I miss it so much, I still miss it, even though I am making the absolute most of the temporary access I currently have. I have been spending a great deal of time in the dusty, silent, lightless joy that is Robarts. (If its…
Jam and Idleness 
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