Now I’m no longer a judge and my reading life has gone back to normal, I’ve been catching up on a backlog of reading. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with gardening. This isn’t entirely new. I posted a month-long series back in 2009 (the year this blog started) on gardening books, though my focus back then was on vegetable gardening. These days, while I have reintroduced … Continue reading Revisiting May Sarton – Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal
I never liked Mr. Rochester. His high-handed behavior and moodiness with Jane Eyre. His sneering treatment of his young ward, Adèle. And his final, obscene pretense that he locked away his mad wife for her sake rather than his own convenience (with all that land and money he couldn’t have had a small cottage built where she could have been kept in relative comfort?). Even when … Continue reading If Only She’d Been Prettier… Charlotte Brontë & The Male Gaze
I’ve set aside today to read. My usual routine for days like this is to make prodigious amounts of tea, put the “fireplace” video on the television and pretend I’m stranded in a Scottish Inn. The video operates under the same concept as the Yule Log. Which, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, is played during the holidays on public television – transforming television screens … Continue reading A Quick Post On A Day Spent Reading, Fake Fireplaces & Sergio Pitol
Title: Letter to Jimmy Author: Alain Mabanckou Translator: Sara Meli Ansari Publisher: Soft Skull Press, Berkeley (2014) ISBN: 978 1 59376 601 6 There has long been a tendency in the West to over-simplify African nations. The most obvious example being the habit of dispensing with identifying the 56 countries which comprise the continent as individual nations and instead referring to them unilaterally as “Africa”. … Continue reading Letter to Jimmy by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Sara Meli Ansari
Title: Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia Author: Julio Cortázar Translator: David Kurnick Publisher: Semiotext(e), Los Angeles (2014) ISBN: 978 1 58435 134 4 One problem with coming to a book without any useful prior knowledge is that your risk being blindsided. For example: sometimes you pick up a novella (Say by Julio Cortázar, an author with whom you’ve had enjoyable experiences in the … Continue reading Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia by Julio Cortázar (translated by David Kurnick)
READER AT LARGE 