Hilary Mantel – 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…

And the silly good times, too

Having been accused of having a “lyrical” writing style because of my last post (about the glorious dearth of big-city noise pollution on Prince Edward Island), I thought I should also make it clear that, as my husband informed me last night: I can be funny, when I put my mind to it. That’s what he said: “You…

Saturday, housebound

I had big plans for this day. My husband’s sunning himself in Costa Rica (when he’s not being rained on by the rain that only happens in the jungle; the kind of rain that, when it hits you, feels like it’s landing a blow, like it’s exacting revenge); I’d looked forward to a good urban…

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…

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…

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….