Boris Pasternak – Jam and Idleness

I used to be a book reviewer

I used to be a book reviewer, sort of. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that for several years in a row, I wrote something about every, or almost every, book I read. My first blog, Bookphilia, was born out of my inability to remember how I’d ever ended up doing a PhD…

This is my brain on Boris Pasternak

I just finished reading Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Reading it has been the tonic I’d been seeking after that desperate run of post-Mantel mediocrity; I freely admit to having planted many platonic, entirely non-pervy smoochies on the book’s cover and pages as I read. Doctor Zhivago is political and historical; it is exuberant in execution…

The Middlemarch effect: Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies

I knew halfway through Middlemarch that whatever book I read next was utterly doomed. Eliot’s novel is too fine, too well-written, too mature (as Woolf so succinctly said, it’s “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”); whatever followed it would come off as shabby, awkward, and half-formed. And it was; I chose a Neal…