Tag: Evelyn Waugh

Blergh

I’m still alive. I’ve been sick for almost a month, but I think I finally felt the flu virus loosen its cold, dead grasp on my innards this past Monday. I am definitely not myself yet but I can, without an exaggerated amount of effort, stay awake all day now. I am getting some work…

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Farewell, farewell! We’ll never meet again, this side of 2014

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…

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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…

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The year of the novella

Or short novel. Or novelette. Or novel for people with short attention spans, limited time, weak arms, extremely unbendable necks, etc. I once looked up the difference between novel, novella, novelette–the latter two seem like the same thing to me, and then both are still novels anyway. In any case, 2014 is clearly Jam and…

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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…

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