tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91904865516708147902024-03-07T19:04:08.672+01:00This Thing of OursThe reading community is small, despised by all, and ever threatened with extinction. New members always welcome!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-48537120544573526222008-01-16T01:58:00.001+01:002008-01-16T01:58:22.216+01:00World's top bookshops The world's most beautiful bookshop, the Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht, according to The Guardian. Read all about it here. It's essentially a giant modular bookshop frame erected inside a Dominican church. If they had erected the self-same framework inside an aircraft hangar, and stocked it with the same books, it doubtless wouldn't have won. The prize is going to the church,Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-36168356582823667932008-01-05T20:54:00.001+01:002008-01-05T20:54:57.815+01:00Poll: Most beautiful children's book  A Flemish paper is running a poll to find out the "most beautiful children's book of all time". As well as Dutch and Flemish titles (only to be expected) the list already contains the likes of Charlotte's Web and The Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are and The Snowman. I take it their definition of "beautiful" is as wide as can be, since they include not Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-74818596745335241852008-01-05T20:52:00.001+01:002008-01-05T20:52:15.055+01:00"Reading pushes the pain away"  "Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there's a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation - with everyone chipping in, so you Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-42866438098481455842007-12-24T00:26:00.001+01:002007-12-24T00:26:27.758+01:00Authorship  Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation. A recovering alcoholic and a fragile spirit, Carver wrote that he was “Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-7619677520943469542007-12-23T12:33:00.001+01:002007-12-23T12:33:32.312+01:00The reading community  More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-26136962412213191542007-12-23T01:44:00.001+01:002007-12-23T01:44:44.693+01:00Bella Italia | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books Her book is a grand buffet of curious delights. Riley writes to entertain as well as to inform, and never holds back when there is a choice anecdote to relate. We are told how to create a table-top rocket by applying a match to the rolled wrapper of an amaretto biscuit, and how the fettuccine Alfredo that appear on every Italian restaurant menu in the US were invented to charm Douglas Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-53893899856930864962007-12-23T01:43:00.001+01:002007-12-23T01:43:00.297+01:00Casterbridge hotel for sale  A hotel immortalised by Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor Of Casterbridge is expected to sell for around £3m, an estate agent said today. The Kings Arms Hotel in Dorchester, Dorset, has played host to Queen Victoria and George VI since it was built in 1720. But it is most famed as the central location for the action in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Michael Henchard, the eponymous mayor Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-69095477748850933152007-11-06T21:57:00.001+01:002007-11-06T21:57:17.217+01:00Oliver SackbutMusicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - Oliver Sacks - Books - Review - New York Times In his earlier collections of clinical tales — most famously in “Awakenings” (1973) and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1985) — Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-85834557447861030732007-09-25T00:38:00.001+01:002007-09-25T00:38:32.649+01:00Censorship by theftKids' Sex Ed Book Under Fire in Maine - 9/21/2007 7:44:00 AM - Publishers Weekly JoAn Karkos of Lewiston was so offended and “horrified” by the children’s book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health by Robie Harris, illus. by Michael Emberley (Candlewick, 1993) that she took matters into her own hands, aiming to keep the books away from children. She checked Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-17923862709960562252007-09-15T10:27:00.001+01:002007-09-15T10:27:26.137+01:00The Dirty Old Dog of the BaskervillesAdultery, my dear Watson | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books Sir Arthur Conan Doyle betrayed his dying wife for a younger woman. Now his letters have finally been made available after more than seven decades, his biographer Andrew Lycett pieces together the affairPowered by ScribeFire.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-49016554932705169682007-09-10T21:13:00.001+01:002007-09-10T21:13:38.062+01:00Nonno NouveThe Literary Life: First at Ninety: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker Millard Kaufman, a début novelist whose book “Bowl of Cherries” comes out this month, has been described by his publisher, McSweeney’s, as quite possibly “the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation.” This is high praise, and would be higher still were it not for the fact that there are few, if any, epic-comedic Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-70219222642345332272007-09-05T12:02:00.001+01:002007-09-05T12:02:13.686+01:00Alan Bennett on Royal readingThe Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett | The digested read | Guardian Unlimited Books Sir Kevin was not at all happy. "Her Majesty is letting her standards slip. She would rather read than open a hospital."The prime minister shook his head. "It's very worrying; reading is not an inclusive activity. She even asked me if I had read Hardy. Seakins will have to go."Powered by ScribeFire.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-66927719434459756342007-08-29T17:28:00.001+01:002007-08-29T17:28:34.663+01:00Louis Menand on biographyInteresting New Yorker article on the prying prurience of biography, even in this age when people spend half their day putting their private lives online for one and all. Extract:The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No onerealized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down theduckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographiesare retrospectiveUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-78374267876200936172007-05-04T19:53:00.001+01:002007-05-04T19:54:30.033+01:00Women and fictionThe title "Women and Fiction" might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write, or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-11990587545102892982007-05-02T12:39:00.001+01:002007-05-02T12:40:28.978+01:00BirthdayJerome, Jerome Klapka (1859–1927), novelist and playwright,was born on 2 May 1859 at Bradford Street, Walsall, Staffordshire, thefourth child and younger son of Jerome Clapp Jerome (1807–1872),nonconformist lay preacher and Staffordshire coalmine owner, andMarguerite Jones (d. 1874), daughter of a Swansea solicitor.from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's daily lives.Powered by Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-12992071808745043782007-04-30T07:22:00.001+01:002007-04-30T07:27:18.119+01:00Different strokes The greater part of valor was choosing what to leave out. It's not a memoir in the strictest sense, because it's not really about us, it's about food production and local economies. The largest emotional events of the year, for us personally, are hardly mentioned, if at all: the death of Steven's sister; my slow recovery from a crippling accident; our family's adjustment after Camille moved to Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-91736014424705360452007-04-28T19:14:00.000+01:002007-04-30T07:28:23.972+01:00Obituary: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood (her Mum)globeandmail.com: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood:"LIVES LIVEDMargaret Dorothy Killam AtwoodMother, dietitian, ice dancer. Born June 8, 1909, in Kinsman's Corners, N.S. Died Dec. 30, 2006, in Toronto, of natural causes, aged 97.MARGARET ATWOODSomeone said to me recently, 'You must have had an unusual mother.' True enough.Margaret Killam was born in 1909 in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Her Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-59563334368058348822007-04-27T21:45:00.001+01:002007-04-27T21:46:22.166+01:00Spotted on Google's blogIn addition, we've just added our most important location yet: an online home at google.com/talks/authors with a video archiveof our events on YouTube. Just this year, we've hosted a great variety of authors, including Martin Amis, Strobe Talbott, Bob & Lee Woodruff, Jonathan Lethem, Don Tapscott, Senator Hillary Clinton, and Carly Fiorina. The subjects of their talks range from literary Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-8523132191780853722007-04-22T13:57:00.001+01:002007-04-22T13:57:53.716+01:00Literary birthdayOxford DNB: Lives of the week Fielding, Henry (1707–1754), author and magistrate, was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, the eldest of the seven children of Colonel Edmund Fielding (1680–1741), a veteran of Marlborough's wars who would rise to the rank of lieutenant-general, and Sarah Gould (bap. 1682, d. 1718), daughter of Sir Henry Gould (1643/4–1710), judge ofUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-1195266860968862392007-02-13T01:07:00.001+01:002007-02-14T21:56:24.443+01:00"Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."That's from Jude the Obscure, obviously. By Hardy, natch--what are you, illiterate? Of course I haven't actually read the book, but no matter.A distinguished French literary professor has become a surprise bestselling author by writing a book explaining how to wax intellectual about tomes that you have never actually read. Pierre Baynard, 52, specialises in the link between literature and Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-32805844000982416982007-02-04T21:17:00.000+01:002007-02-04T21:39:46.474+01:00Book Report: A Million PenguinsOne of the most persistent memes affecting the writing newsgroups in their heyday -- alt.writing, misc.writing and rec.arts.prose in my own experience -- was the recurrent invitation to take part in an exercise of communal composition, where people would join in to write a story either together or serially.These days we know that such things are called wikis, and it was only a matter of time Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-2355137990710507222007-02-01T00:56:00.000+01:002007-02-01T01:26:01.210+01:00Copycattery not so bad after all?Jonathan Kirsch reviews The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard Posner. Posner points out that T.S. Eliot's masterpiece "The Waste Land" is "a tissue of quotations (without quotation marks)," a fact that Eliot himself seems to have acknowledged when he elsewhere observed: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-5629139526665970172007-01-30T22:24:00.000+01:002007-01-30T22:51:30.669+01:00Led by the noseContinuing with our reflections on smell, a fascinating article in the New York Times on lethal smells. Oddly enough, though you have to be a Times subscriber (or pay) to read it there, you can see it here at the IHT for free. Go figger.The article is by Luca Turin, probably the world's most famous nose, and deals with stinks rather than scents. And the lethality of no smell at all -- some of theUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-47301767851502290282007-01-22T19:32:00.000+01:002007-01-22T19:39:22.938+01:00Wodehouse in the houseSomeone on a blog I was reading quoted one sentence of PG Wodehouse, and as always happens, I LOLled. Is there now or has there ever been another writer who so consistently has that effect on people?The someone was John Baker, who maintains a writing blog that's well worth keeping an eye on. What I like best about him is his cat-burglar approach: he's in and out in a matter of minutes, and beforeUnknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-56563720343523241212007-01-20T23:42:00.000+01:002007-01-20T23:55:06.317+01:00On this dayLast year on Sour Grapes (there have been no other years on Sour Grapes) I locked myself into the duty of providing one quote every day on a particular theme, and soon found it such an onerous task I almost abandoned it, and was only saved by the ability to pre-write posts and arrange for them to be posted automagically on the day required.So I'm anxious about the ability or determination of Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0