Novel Readings has a new address
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Novel Readings has a new address!
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: Slouching Towards the End
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I was about to open this post by saying “it has been a tough week” when I realized it’s only Monday! On the other hand, it has been a challenging week if we start it back at last Monday, and since I haven’t posted here since then, I think that’s fair enough.
Read MorePiffle: Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
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“If anybody every marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle,” said Harriet, severely. Strong Poison was the first Peter Wimsey novel I ever read.
Read More“According to the Peruzzi”: Antonio Pennacchi, The Mussolini Canal
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I make no claim to be telling you God’s own truth, the perfect and absolute truth which is known to Him alone. I’m telling you the truth according to the Peruzzi, as my uncles told it to me, as they themselves had lived it.
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: After This, The Deluge!
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I was talking with some colleagues last night and we all agreed that it is going to be hard to regain the momentum we’ve lost in our classes after this unusually long fall break–it’s extended because today is a holiday “in lieu of Remembrance Day.”
Read MoreNevertheless, I Persisted: One Year Later
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One year ago this week, the members of my promotion appeal panel wrote up their final decision: in their view, my file (“with its heavy reliance on non-peer-reviewed on-line venues”) had not met the requisite standard and therefore “promotion to full professor is not merited at this time.”
Read More“The Resurrection of the Ordinary”: Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
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So the wind that billowed her sheets announced to her the resurrection of the ordinary. I was actually tempted to take my title and epigraph, not from Housekeeping, but from Middlemarch.
Read More“Detaching the Threads”: May Sarton, A Reckoning
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Yes, Laura thought, it’s like a web. Whatever the secret, the real connections, we are inextricably woven into a huge web together, and detaching the threads, one by one, is hideously painful. As long as one still feels the tug, one is not ready to die.
Read More“The Game Is Up”: Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck
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The moment when the dashing, exceedingly well-dressed, but annoyingly remote Earl of Worth declares “The game is up!” is the moment I finally understood fully that the reason I hadn’t liked him much throughout the rest of the novel is that he’s both the romantic lead and a detective hero–part Regency rake and part Sherlock Holmes.
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: Erring Women
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In both of my classes this week we are focusing on young women making mistakes. It’s interesting for me (and I hope also for the students who are in both classes) to compare the very different ways their novels approach their rather different errors. Both of them do wrong things for right reasons.
Read MoreEducation and Failure: Tanya Talaga, Seven Fallen Feathers
/“To understand the stories of the seven lost students who are the subjects of this book,” Tanya Talaga begins her devastating, angry, and thought-provoking book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, you must understand Thunder Bay’s past, how the seeds of division, of acrimony and distaste, of a lack of […]
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: Politics and Moral Complicity
/The 2016 U. S. election has given some books I regularly teach new resonance–and not in a good way. In March 2016, Hard Times was indeed “for these times,” with Mr. Bounderby running for President: He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. […]
Read More“The Lesson Will Live”: Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey
/One of the strange things about teaching is that you can never know what your effect will be on others; can never know, if you have something to teach, who your real students will be, the ones who will take what you have to give and make it their own . . . can never […]
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: Keeping Up
/The first couple of weeks of the new term are always deceptive: you anticipate them with so much anxiety after the slower pace of summer work, but then for a while, though the logistics are a bit hectic and there are more day-to-day deadlines, it doesn’t seem that bad. But then the first significant assignments […]
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: Blather, Rinse, Repeat
/I’ve put off writing this post, hoping that I’d get some bright idea about what to say in it. Is it possible that I’ve been reporting on my weekly class business for too long? Everything I have to say seems like something I’ve said before. Actually, that in itself might be worth considering, because I […]
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: Every Word Counts
/We’re one week into the fall term and I’m starting to feel that I’ve got my sea legs back. Every new term seems a bit herky-jerky at first, but before long it smooths out, or at least becomes routine again. In Close Reading, where my initial goal is to foster a habit of paying close […]
Read MoreBurning Down the House: Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
/On the very first page of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, Elena Richardson’s house burns down. Everyone, including Elena, immediately and rightly identifies her renegade youngest daughter Izzy as the arsonist, but it’s not until three hundred pages later that we learn why she did it–that to her it was not act of destruction, but […]
Read MoreThis Week In My Classes: (Bad) First Impressions
/Or maybe not. I hope not. I don’t mean that my students in the classes that started up today made a bad impression on me–far from it, in fact, as they seemed pretty attentive and ready to go, which is impressive considering the circumstances of my first class meeting this morning, at least. But their […]
Read MoreSummer Reading, 2017 Edition
/There was an undeniable nip in the air when I went on my run this morning–the overnight forecast even included the ominous words “risk of frost.” Though we are sure to have some more warm weather as September unfolds, it will be nice fall weather: the season is definitely changing. The other sure sign of […]
Read More“My Own Way”: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes
/“Say you won’t leave us, Lolly.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” “But Lolly, what you want is absurd.” “It’s only my own way, Henry.” In many ways, Lolly Willowes is a familiar book. Like Villette or The Odd Women or The Crowded Street, it is the story of a woman whose life does not conform to the expected […]
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