We have moved! I can’t recall what I’ve read in the meantime, except that it was all excellent (I think); I will consult Goodreads and return with a report. I am reading an excellent novel now–Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters–which possesses one of my favourite first lines so far encountered: “To begin with the old…
Tag: Anthony Trollope
Alright fine
I submit, surrender, and beg forgiveness; at the rate things are going with getting ready to move and doing home renos, I have finally accepted that I am just never going to get caught up on my book posts unless I corral them. Well then, giddyup. Barry Lyndon, William Makepeace Thackeray. I wanted to love…
More on the Trollope/Dickens affair, or, why I’m more dubious than ever about biography
In the interests of following up on my entirely non-rhetorical question about what Trollope meant to Dickens, I’ve been doing a little reading. I’ve consulted Victoria Glendinning’s 1992 biography Anthony Trollope and ended up with a little bit of new information and a whole lot of new frustration. I’ll explain the latter shortly. But here’s…
Exquisite dishes, of the finest cuisine: Jorge Amado and the literary art of food
Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands claims, in its subtitle, to be about “the fearsome battle between spirit and matter”. It isn’t much of a battle, in the end–having known extremities of sexual joy with her first husband, the roguish and incorrigible Vadhino, Dona Flor tries to re-imagine herself as a staid and…
A recurring character in the novels of Anthony Trollope: Charles Dickens
Last year, I read Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography and almost broke up with him; as it was, just taking a break helped me to fall back in blissful love with him. In the last few months, I’ve read the first two novels in his most famous series, the Chronicles of Barsetshire: The Warden and Barchester Towers….
Tea and toast
In his “I’m going to pretend to be homeless and then write the last word on homelessness” book (Down and Out in Paris and London), George Orwell discusses the charitable insult of being obliged to choke back a lecture on religion to get churches’ free “tea-and-two-slices”. I read this book in 1998, I think; it…
Say hello
Friends, welcome to Jam and Idleness! I’ve just now put my first blog, Bookphilia, to bed and am really pleased to be officially launching this new venture. Check out the about tab for a little breakdown on what inspired this change. Over at Bookphilia, you can see what my favourite books of the last year…
Jam and Idleness 