George Eliot – Jam and Idleness

2015: Year of the Woolf

It’s been a satisfying and frustrating year; one of highs and lows, hope and something approaching despair (never actual despair; there would be no talking about full and ripe despair); productivity and slackness; the joyful and the maudlin…. Where am I going here? Straight to Dickens, it seems: 2015 really has encompassed the best and worst of…

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…

How to write a book review of the greatest novel in the history of English literature

I finished reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch weeks ago. I put it off for years; I suspected it would be the best book I’d ever read and I wanted to have that experience to look forward to. I like rationing what I know will be superb, brilliant, superlative* books. I also feared what would happen to…

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…