Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities. When I wrote about Madame Bovary here a couple of years ago, I commented that reading a very famous novel for the first time is like meeting a celebrity in person (or so I imagine). It is intensely […]

Technically, this post should really be called “This Week For My Classes,” since of course I’m not actually teaching any right now. In between other projects, though (mostly finishing a small essayish review on Mary Balogh’s Only Beloved for the next issue of Open Letters — yes, that’s right, I am trying my hand at writing a little bit about […]

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” –  Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice “I’m in love with you. It’s probably an illusion caused by the release of oxytocin during sex, but I feel as […]

Over the weekend I finally wrapped up my first ever run-through of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I started watching the series last summer, I actually came to it with remarkably little information and no preconceptions except that (and obviously I got over this one) it probably wasn’t going to be a hit with me, since vampires — […]

Where does the time go? It seems like I only just finished reading The Danish Girl, but here it’s almost a whole week later and I haven’t written another word here. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. In fact, in among the other business of the week (which included the department’s traditional “May marks meeting” […]

She’d learned to live with him, with his transformation. Yes, it was if Einar were on a perpetual track of transformation, as if these changes — the mysterious blood, the hollow cheeks, the unfulfilled longing — would never case, would lead to no end. And when she thought about it, who wasn’t always changing? Wasn’t […]

A friend of mine highly recommended Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, but when I looked for it at the bookstore they didn’t have it, so instead I brought home his more recent novel Benediction. It seems to me to have been a happy enough substitution: Plainsong may yet turn out to be better, but I thought Benediction was very good. Benediction is […]