My lovely mother has been visiting us, and today we went exploring a bit. I don’t like highway driving (or really any driving, though of course I do what I have to), so I was happy to find an article about fun things to do around Halifax without a car. One suggestion was taking the […]

This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is partly because there isn’t any conversation. I could just fill pages like this: ‘I am sure it is true,’ said Phyllida. ‘I cannot agree with you,’ answered Norman. ‘Oh, but I know I am […]

An essay I worked on during my sabbatical on faith and fellowship in Middlemarch has just been published in Berfrois. The general themes will not surprise any regular visitors to Novel Readings (or readers of my other essays on George Eliot, particularly my essay on Silas Marner in the Los Angeles Review of Books). In fact, the germ of this essay was a […]

I don’t really understand why I didn’t like The Stone Diaries this time. Did I reread it at the wrong moment for me, somehow? I admired lots of pieces of it as I was reading, but my overall experience of it was that it was too miscellaneous: that it incorporated too many elements that ended up feeling […]

It’s that time of year again for academics around here: the fall term is closing in, and that means it’s time to finalize the syllabi for our classes. For me, this is a process that generates equal parts enthusiasm and irritation. I enjoy the optimism of course planning: it’s fun to anticipate the intellectual sparks that can […]

He no longer heard any tales, and they became lost to him. All his people were gone, forgotten and buried in deserted rural areas. He, in turn, drifted through a city that he had no business being in. Knew that he was not the urban type. Could not really tell what he was. But he […]

In among my other recent chores and challenges I’ve read a few things chosen primarily for their likely distraction value. I don’t have a whole post’s worth of comments on any of them but I thought I’d round them up here, just to sort out my impressions of them. First, two romance novels: Julie James’s Suddenly […]

I’ve watched the recent craze for “adult” coloring books with a mixture of amusement and nostalgia. While some people are celebrating the idea as both creative and consoling, others find it one more sign of the infantilization of our culture. For me, it brings back a lot of memories of family camping trips: coloring books and markers were necessary camping […]

I’m in a slump — a writing slump, mostly, but (and relatedly) also an emotional slump. I will come out of it, I’m sure, but so far I haven’t figured out exactly how. Some of it is my usual summertime blues, which have been exacerbated this year by how grey and rainy it has been […]

Twice, Iris has said to Peter Conradi that she now feels that she is “sailing into the darkness.” It was when he asked her, gently, about her writing. Such a phrase might be said to indicate the sort of inner knowledge that I had in mind. It seems to convey a terrible lucidity about what […]

Which were her real children? Poor Doug and dear Helen and brilliant George and troubled Cathy? Or sensible Flora and wonderful Jinny and talented Philip? Was Sammy or Rhodri her favorite grandchild? Only one set of them could possibly be real, but which? She loved them all, and there was no real difference in the […]

The faces of the actors have been subtly transformed. They are seen joined in a ceremonial act of reconstruction, perhaps even an act of creation. There need be no suggestion that any of them will become less selfish in the future, less cranky, less consumed with thoughts of tenure and academic glory, but each of […]

“It’s this area, you see, the birds and the people, we’re all intertwined, caught up in one another’s history. We could never let it perish, a place like this.” Despite my wariness of new (or just new-to-me) mysteries, I took a chance on Steve Burrows’ A Siege of Bitterns because when I peered at it in […]