It feels a little odd doing a year-end wrap-up of a mostly silent blog year, but I think I can handle it; in fact, I’m going to enjoy this opportunity to run off at the mouf a bit. Anyway, the usual, hey? Highlights, a few lowlights, and some mush about what’ll go down in 2015 (because I…
Tag: Charles Dickens
Brain/Food: a 21st-century Tasha Tudor
Tasha Brandstatter is one of my internet people. For a while, we both wrote for the sadly now retired Food Riot, but long before that, we knew each other as book bloggers. (I think I even once wrote a guest post for her Truth, Beauty, Freedom, & Books site about what constitutes a Classic…which is hilarious,…
I do not think it means what you think it means
This post’s title is, of course, inspired by that cinematic opus, The Princess Bride. But then, really, what isn’t inspired by The Princess Bride? I submit to you that it is one of the most perfect films ever made and that it should have won every award possible, including the Nobel Peace Prize. If you…
Approaching normal
What have I been doing? Moving, renovating, cycling, being sick (hubby and I were laid low with food poisoning this week and I’m still not really okay), and reading. What have I been reading? I couldn’t recall when I typed that compellingly original rhetorical question; I actually had to check the Goodreads to see what…
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…
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…
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