Tom is the creator, author, curator, and genius responsible for Wuthering Expectations, one of the best book blogs going. This is almost all I know of him. Wait, I also know this: He’s such a damned good writer that even when he writes about books I would loathe, or have already read and loathed, I…
Month: May 2013
Humiliation fatigue: thoughts on the mayor of my adopted city
Last night, both Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel took aim at my city’s mayor, Rob Ford–for a video in which he’s apparently seen to be smoking crack. This morning, local news outlets are having shit fits and claiming, among other things, that Ford is ruining Toronto’s reputation–and ruining it for the long run. I don’t…
In the world to come there will be no room for such people
As I noted over at Bookphilia back in 2010, finding anything by Osamu Dazai around here is a real challenge. A few months ago, I found his novel of post-war upheaval, The Setting Sun, in the delightful Ten Editions. Knowing that I might suffer from another years-long Dazai drought, I tried to hold off on…
Blood and poison
Irene Nemirovsky is not someone whose works I see being reviewed much in the blogosphere–at least not in the very small corner of it that I inhabit–and I can’t understand why. For a perfect combination of stylistic elegance and psychological acuity distilled down to their essences (no door-stoppers here) I can’t think of her equal….
We are all of us better when she is near us
I recently read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and both adored it and was bemused by it. I don’t quite know what I think Gaskell was doing with this book–or, even, what kind of book it is, in terms of basic genre distinctions. I’m pretty sure it’s fantasy of some sort though. Cranford is a series of…
Sammich!
Back in the late 80s or early 90s, I began ironically referring to sandwiches as “sammiches.” It seemed to me that “sandwich” was entirely too posh and tightly laced a word for what I meant and wanted from meals comprising two or more pieces of bread and delicious fillings of various sorts. A really good…
Ink and paper
I received a real hand-written letter in the mail today! A few weeks ago, I wrote about letters being what I miss most now that we live in the post-handwriting age. Stefanie over at So Many Books promised to send me a letter if I would send one back…well, hers arrived just a few minutes…
Stupid shallow people being awful to one another
When I picked up Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, I did so because I knew the writing would be satisfying even if the content might ultimately be forgettable. I was not wrong–about the writing. As always, the writing is lovely and perfect and clean and compelling. I was wrong about the content, however, but…
Jam and Idleness 
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