The Line of Beauty joins an illustrious line of novels I’ve read that I admire but am unable to like. It makes me feel better about saying this that I’ve recently been reminded of Henry James’s admission, in “The Art of Fiction,” that “nothing … will ever take the place of the good old fashion […]

A Change of Climate is an odd book. I didn’t love it, perhaps because I didn’t know quite what to make of it. It reminded me a lot of Joanna Trollope’s earlier novels — the “aga saga” ones, like A Village Affair, or Marrying the Mistress. It has a small cast of intertwined characters, all more or less eccentric, all […]

I first learned about Play It Again, Alan Rusbridger’s account of his quest to learn Chopin’s great Ballade No.1, from Robert Winter’s recent review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a convincingly positive review, which is why it sent me out to get the book, but as I worked through Play It Again I found myself thinking that Winter […]

The only thing that’s really true, that lasts, and makes life worthwhile is the truth that’s fixed in the heart. That’s what we live and die for. It comes in epiphanies, and it comes in love, and don’t ever let frightened people turn you away from it. In Sunlight and In Shadow is surely one of […]

Every action flew down the tangled net of links, reverberating and amplifying itself and disappearing only to reappear again. . . . There was no escaping the reactions to your actions, and no respite from the responsibility. That’s how it happened. That was life. Everything and everybody is connected, somehow, somewhere: this is the structuring […]

Classes wrapped up for the term on Monday. Usually I feel deflated, if also a bit relieved, after my last class meetings. For all that the ongoing pressure to be ready and keep on top of everything can be wearing, the energy I get from actually being in the classroom more than makes up for it. Last […]

We aren’t quite done with classes here, at least not those of us on a MWF schedule – my last meetings are Monday. It’s hard to believe we are so close to finishing, though, mostly because today is the first day there’s any hint of spring at all, and usually I strongly associate the last […]