Category: Books
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The Open Book Club
Sign up here. Setting some #2023goals? Want to escape digital distractions into a classic novel or two? Whether you’re an avid reader or you can’t name the last print book you finished, the Open Book Club is here for you. From January to March 2023, you’ll read two short novels — Jane Austen’s Emma (1816)…
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On Javier Marías
The prodigious writer Javier Marías has published 28 novels in Spanish since 1971; translated major English-language writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Laurence Sterne into Spanish; and written more than a thousand newspaper columns and other essays and reviews. We learn this from Alexis Grohmann’s introduction to Between Eternities, a 2018 collection of 48 of those…
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Notes to a First Reader of A. S. Byatt
I wrote these ‘Notes and Enthusiasms for a First Reader of A. S. Byatt’s Possession’ for a friend in Oxford, and am sharing them here. Above all, I envy you. You’re about to read one of the most complex, beautiful works of contemporary British fiction. A.S. Byatt’s Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990 and,…
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What (Might Have) Happened
“It’s important that we understand what really happened. Because that’s the only way we can stop it from happening again.” Last year’s election of Donald Trump prompted me to write an open breakup letter to American political coverage. My resolve has eroded steadily over the past 10 months, but it shattered today. This morning I…
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Samuel Pepys and the Sonnet
A few months ago in this space, I wrote about choosing novels to teach in a graduate course I’m offering this fall. I was convinced that novels were necessary because it’s a course on digital text-analysis, among other topics in the digital humanities. And because my exemplary critics Stephen Ramsay and Matthew Jockers (required reading for…
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Podcast Prescriptions
I’d be in radio if I wasn’t an academic. Not the WKRP disc-jockey kind of radio, but the tweedy public-radio kind. The kind that produces a 5-hour intellectual biography of Northrop Frye, or Eleanor Wachtel’s long, thoughtful interviews with writers like A.S. Byatt or Kazuo Ishiguro. I mean radio that exposes you to ideas and people…
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Reading Poetry Aloud
“The experience of reading poetry aloud when you don’t fully understand it is a curious and complicated one. It’s like suddenly discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command; and as you utter them you begin to realize that the sound…
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Novels for Algorithms
I’m designing the graduate seminar I’ll teach in the Department of English this fall (2015) on the subject of ‘Algorithmic Criticism,’ a title I took from the subtitle of Stephen Ramsay’s 2011 book, Reading Machines. It’s an introduction to computational text-analysis for students of literature, from word frequency to topic modelling. By the end of…
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Lend me your earbuds
A word, if you will, in praise of the audiobook. I’m listening now, for the second time with my second child, to the 7-book 20+hour Harry Potter series, read by the incomparable Stephen Fry. Fry’s voice is like treacle pudding, warm and inviting. (He’s particularly good at bears, from Pooh to Paddington.) But you don’t…
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Books I Own but have not Read: 2
Second in a series on the unread books on my teeming shelves. The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets (1927) is probably the least auspicious title on my small shelf of clothbound anthologies. And deliberately so. Its editor J. C. Squire deliberately contrasts it with Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Those…