Joannah Caborn One of the best things about this book are the dedications. The first one: “To quietly flowing Don”. The second is a Gogol quote, from Dead Souls (1842): “We live in new times – the age of the hero is past – now is the time of the non-virtuous man.” Unfortunately, it goes …
Continue reading Marina Lewycka: Various pets alive and dead. Penguin, 2012.
Honoré de Balzac The Black Sheep (La Rabouilleuse) Tr. Donald Adamson More than forty-five years have passed between my first acquaintance with Balzac and this renewal. Of that first work I read (Pere Goriot) I carry a strong impression, mainly of the atmosphere. Had I not read Balzac then, I guess I would never got …
My dear reading compatriots: I would like to propose something of a challenge. While I don't know the range of linguistic abilities among us, having never met the majority of you, I wonder if it would be possible for us as a group to undertake the same sort of challenge as BBC's Ann Morgan. Would …
Abbas Hassan This is a very readable and sweeping account of Charles Dickens' life. What I found striking about the book was that it presented a very lucid, chatty narrative with trivia about all the books he wrote, the friends he kept (and did not), his habits, his weaknesses, his motivations, his marriage and more …
Imran Ali Khan At 7am when your eyes are still adjusting unwillingly to the sun, and you have just stood in a queue to have your bags scanned and your person felt up at the Pune airport, to find the shutters of a bookshop open is almost as close to salvation as one would get. …
The America of mimimum wage workers is not one that gets a lot of attention in the media. To quote Polly Toynbee’s introduction to this book, it is “a secret continent”. “The barely reported truth about the American dream is that it exists in a country of widespread, growing and inescapable poverty, where the essential …
Continue reading Nickle and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA—Barbara Ehrenreich
This is a strange and beautifully written tale told by two young women, Mary and Morgan. Mary lives in a community on an island where the islanders trade with the “tall men” who come from the mainland. Boys on the island start to disappear, and Mary suspects the tall men. One day, when the tall …
This is a useful excerpt from the article you can access via the link below. New ground is better than common ground: not “I haven’t read that yet—let’s discuss something else” but rather “I may never read that, so tell me about it, it sounds interesting.” http://quarterlyconversation.com/we-have-never-been-well-read-franco-morettis-pact-with-the-devil Having now read Andrew Seal's (high-brow and apt to …
Continue reading We Have Never Been Well-Read: Franco Moretti’s Pact with the Devil
Usha Raman I encountered Margaret Atwood first in a dusty, old edition of "The Handmaid's Tale", a dark and disturbing view of a dystopic future in which reproductive rights and rights of association are nonexistent. I moved on to "The Robber Bride", also somewhat dark but not without touches of humour. There are many other …
This is in response to Lulu’s review of The Twelfth Imam, which she said was her first political thriller and seems to have been quite disappointing. Try this one. The book is set in the near future. Because global warming has made sea levels rise, several countries are having to relocate populations in threatened areas …
Talking About Books 