Between the Covers (Free subscription) | yesterday
Chunkster Challenge #2 Classics Challenge #4 In a dusty book once owned by the great nineteenth-century poet Randolph Henry Ash, scholar Roland Michell finds two draft beginnings of a letter. These drafts are surprising, not only because they’ve escaped the attentions of rapacious Ash collector Mortimer Cropper, but because they don’t sound at all like the rather dull Ash with whom Roland...
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
... Library Journal Best Books 2009 featuring A.S. Byatt, K'wan, & Bich Minh Nguyen. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The Written World (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
I haven't really been inspired to blog this week. I have been reading, but not finishing anything, so I guess I don't really feel like I have anything to talk about. I am going to write a general post instead. I am reading some really good books at the moment. I am about 200 pages into Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. It is really really good! Then, I am reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. I like...
bookeywookey (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Today’s question was suggested by Barbara : Do you think any current author is of the same caliber as Dickens, Austen, Bronte, or any of the classic authors? If so, who, and why do you think so? If not, why not? What books from this era might be read 100 years from now? I am not sure what qualities Barbara thinks give Dickens, Austen, and Bronte their status but I would say that, through a combination...
The Economist (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
The enduring appeal of Jane Austen A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen. Edited by Susannah Carson. Random House; 320 pages; $25. Buy from Amazon.com “SOME literary works are mortal; Jane Austen’s are immortal,” writes Harold Bloom in his foreword to this delightful volume. In it, 33 writers—from Virginia Woolf to Jay McInerney, from...
Iron Caisson (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
I am all for spreading the good word about Great Books by Women that Publisher's Weekly Missed in 2009 , but for some reason Guerrilla Girls on Tour (not to be confused with Guerrilla Girls ) published the open-edit WILLA wiki list as their own. And sans link, so readers don't know they can add their own titles. W-e-i-r-d. They tell us they'll give WILLA a shout out tomorrow, but in the meantime, I...
'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' (Free subscription) | 11/12/2009
A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession plays a part in the story-line of The Serpent Pool . It was a pleasure to give a nod to a book that I greatly admired when I first read it, not long after it won the Booker Prize (now the Man Booker Prize.) The novel is splendidly written, for sure, but it also tells a really good story – and there are some very well written books which don’t really do...
Between the Covers (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
As I just posted , I’ve been unwell for some days and am now seriously behind in my NaNoWriMo wordcount. Hence I’ve been obliged to drop out of the Chunkster Challenge . There’s just no way I can catch up with NaNo, finish another huge book, and produce the necessary reviews for this and the Classics Challenge in 5 days. At least, not if I want to sleep. I did read three books for...
USA Today (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
In fact or fiction, the world is not a safe place for children. That is a foundation stone of A.S. Byatt's sweeping novel The ...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
Authors give their views on the high-street chain Blake Morrison I am ashamed to say I buy most of my books online these days, but Waterstone's in its early days was great, particularly for authors. They organised lots of readings and bookshop events. You had a real sense of individual managers being able to choose what they wanted. Then it all became very centralised. People romanticise the independent...
Teach Me Tonight (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
Laura Vivanco In her presentation, ‘The Life of Georgette Heyer,’ Jennifer Kloester revealed that she has completed a new biography of Heyer and hopes it will be published next year by Random House. [LV comment: Random House, under its Arrow imprint, has reprinted Heyer's works and published both Jennifer Kloester's Georgette Heyer's Regency World and Jane Aiken Hodge's biography of Heyer.]...
Tennessee Guerilla Women (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
Just when you thought we had finally buried that insufferable patriarchal tradition of declaring that all the best thoughts, all the best books were written by the men . . . along comes sexist Publisher's Weekly . Publisher's Weekly, a U.S. trade magazine, has decreed that all the best books of 2009 are books written by men. Because the menz are the best!! Clearly, Publisher's Weekly still believes...
educating alice (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
This is a grown-up book for grown-up people who haven’t forgotten being childhood readers. It satisfies imagination and curiosity, revisiting things you suddenly remember clearly, telling you new things you didn’t know. A. S. Byatt reviews Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters in the Guardian.
Seattle Times (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
"The Children's Book" is English novelist A.S. Byatt's richly detailed saga of a free-spirited English family in the Edwardian age.
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
Children's books deserve this grown-up study. By AS Byatt This is a risky and brilliant title. The Enchanted Hunters is the hotel where the predatory monster Humbert Humbert has his way with the nymphet Lolita. Maria Tatar is the author of the excellent Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales as well as works on the Bluebeard story, Hans Andersen, and sexual murder in Weimar. Enchanted Hunters is not...
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