tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91904865516708147902012-01-28T02:36:37.213+01:00The reading community is small, despised by all, and ever threatened with extinction. New members always welcome!Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.comBlogger391100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-48537120544573526222008-01-16T01:58:00.001+01:002008-01-16T01:58:22.216+01:00

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,

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-36168356582823667932008-01-05T20:54:00.001+01:002008-01-05T20:54:57.815+01:00

  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 only Sendak and Briggs, but

Sour Grapesnoreply@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 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 feel part of

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-42866438098481455842007-12-24T00:26:00.001+01:002007-12-24T00:26:27.758+01:00

  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 “confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid.”

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-7619677520943469542007-12-23T12:33:00.001+01:002007-12-23T12:33:32.312+01:00

  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”—declined from fifteen per

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-26136962412213191542007-12-23T01:44:00.001+01:002007-12-23T01:44:44.693+01:00

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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-53893899856930864962007-12-23T01:43:00.001+01:002007-12-23T01:43:00.297+01:00

  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 of the

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-69095477748850933152007-11-06T21:57:00.001+01:002007-11-06T21:57:17.217+01:00

Musicophilia: 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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-85834557447861030732007-09-25T00:38:00.001+01:002007-09-25T00:38:32.649+01:00

Kids' 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 out

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-17923862709960562252007-09-15T10:27:00.001+01:002007-09-15T10:27:26.137+01:00

Adultery, 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.

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-49016554932705169682007-09-10T21:13:00.001+01:002007-09-10T21:13:38.062+01:00

The 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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-70219222642345332272007-09-05T12:02:00.001+01:002007-09-05T12:02:13.686+01:00

The 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.

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-66927719434459756342007-08-29T17:28:00.001+01:002007-08-29T17:28:34.663+01:00

Interesting 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 retrospective

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-78374267876200936172007-05-04T19:53:00.001+01:002007-05-04T19:54:30.033+01:00

The 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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-11990587545102892982007-05-02T12:39:00.001+01:002007-05-02T12:40:28.978+01:00

Jerome, 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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-12992071808745043782007-04-30T07:22:00.001+01:002007-04-30T07:27:18.119+01:00

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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-91736014424705360452007-04-28T19:14:00.000+01:002007-04-30T07:28:23.972+01:00

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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-59563334368058348822007-04-27T21:45:00.001+01:002007-04-27T21:46:22.166+01:00

In 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 fiction

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-8523132191780853722007-04-22T13:57:00.001+01:002007-04-22T13:57:53.716+01:00

Oxford 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 of

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-1195266860968862392007-02-13T01:07:00.001+01:002007-02-14T21:56:24.443+01:00

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

Paulanoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-32805844000982416982007-02-04T21:17:00.000+01:002007-02-04T21:39:46.474+01:00

One 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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-2355137990710507222007-02-01T00:56:00.000+01:002007-02-01T01:26:01.210+01:00

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,

Paulanoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-5629139526665970172007-01-30T22:24:00.000+01:002007-01-30T22:51:30.669+01:00

Continuing 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 the

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-47301767851502290282007-01-22T19:32:00.000+01:002007-01-22T19:39:22.938+01:00

Someone 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 before

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-56563720343523241212007-01-20T23:42:00.000+01:002007-01-20T23:55:06.317+01:00

Last 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

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-9516443295659723802007-01-17T17:49:00.001+01:002007-01-17T19:09:30.839+01:00

What do you get when 125 of today's writers are asked to nominate their best books of all time? The answer is, something like the unwieldy 544-title list included in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, on sale now. If you buy the book, you get a more detailed breakdown of who chose what, as well as some advocacy from some writers for their picks. But in the absence of an actual copy,

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-55641233917084770822007-01-14T23:52:00.000+01:002007-01-15T00:22:53.385+01:00

Here is a list of all the books Art Garfunkel has read since 1968. Yes, that Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel, and Bad Timing, and Bright Eyes. There are 967 of them, bringing us up to January 2006 or an average of 26 books a year, or one every two weeks. That's not a particularly voracious schedule, despite what the website says. Let's face it: in his years with Paul Simon he never really

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-53093225161969011252007-01-13T13:04:00.000+01:002007-01-13T13:09:45.154+01:00

Robert Fisk has a bit of a rant in The Independent about the rise of jargon and the corruption of words. Key paragraph:Some newly popular phrases, such as "tipping point" - used about Middle East conflicts when the bad guys are about to lose - or "big picture" - when moralists have to be reminded of the greater good - are merely fashionable. Others are simply odd. I always mixed up "bonding" with

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-23188838534800614162007-01-03T23:59:00.000+01:002007-01-04T00:06:38.940+01:00

Banging on about Pepys once more, but yesterday's Life of the Day from the Dictionary of National Biography was his, and included a paragraph on his education:St Paul's gave Pepys a leaving exhibition in 1650, and on 21 June he entered his name at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where his uncle John Pepys LLD was a fellow. Several members of the family had distinguished themselves in the law, and Samuel

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-590947143405900332006-12-24T18:43:00.000+01:002006-12-24T18:46:37.015+01:00

The Guardian is running its usual end of the year Books Quiz. Give it a go, you have 21 to beat. And my wrong answers were on Kingsley Amis pinching girls' bums, something about Harry Potter and something about sleb autobiogs. None of which has anything to do with books, obviously, rotters, chiz chiz.

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-6666259396345766382006-12-23T22:15:00.000+01:002006-12-23T22:18:31.360+01:00

In response to a question from ing posted IN THE WRONG PLACE I've listed all my Bought But Unread books here. I only mention it in case there are readers of TTOO who don't read Sour Grapes. Now if only people would keep their comments in the right blog, I wouldn't have to keep chopping and changing and stuff. Work with me here, people.

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-89752330465309710332006-12-22T22:53:00.000+01:002006-12-22T23:07:20.215+01:00

Following the post below, I was steered (by a newsgroup post) in the direction of a wonderful 1732 poem by Jonathan Swift, The Lady's Dressing Room, a prize exhibit in the natural history of bodily odours. A young man gains access to his sweetheart's bedroom, and what he sees there -- and in particular what he smells there -- leads to a dampening of his ardour. I have to quote one passage, which

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-78231934516255673492006-12-22T20:15:00.000+01:002006-12-22T20:56:22.000+01:00

Since there's still at least one, possibly two, shopping days left until Christmas, and given that some people seem not to have all their presents bought and wrapped, here's a suggestion:The Very Short Introduction series of paperbacks produced by the Oxford University Press have that irreproachable OUP cachet, of course, which is an assurance that even though you're getting a pre-digested bolus

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-26983450134435997992006-12-12T16:52:00.000+01:002006-12-12T22:27:42.612+01:00

Great blog I just stumbled on, by a retired teacher in Tasmania, whose passion is Victorian history. Another example of the many ways blogs can be used. You got your angst-ridden journals, your commonplace books, your Op-Ed sections, your photo-albums, and something like this, which is simply a space for short essays of indeterminate length on subjects of interest. The first post I read was a

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-91863976418020627502006-12-05T21:59:00.000+01:002006-12-05T23:36:56.814+01:00

The patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad in Palace Walk by the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz is the master of all he surveys. He terrorises his family of three boys and two girls, and his wife Amina, who wakes at midnight every evening to prepare for his home-coming from carousing. He's a respected and prominent merchant. He's adored by his circle of friends for his wit. And he has loose women falling

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-70546252607870558652006-11-23T01:05:00.001+01:002006-12-05T23:37:50.907+01:00

What could this world of which she saw nothing but the minarets and roofs be like? A quarter of a century had passed while she was confined to this house, leaving it only on infrequent occasions to visit her mother in al-Khurunfush. Her husband escorted her on each visit in a carriage, because he could not bear for anyone to see his wife, either alone or accompanied by him. She was neither

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-14803795791533868242006-11-23T01:01:00.001+01:002006-11-23T14:36:12.388+01:00

Some books, even as you're reading them, are telling you they'll need to be read twice, and so it was with The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk, as you'll be aware, won this year's Nobel Prize for literature, a decision that was surprising on literary grounds -- Pamuk is quite young, and not all that weighty. From my perusal of reviews of his work, he seems to like to fiddle within genres, in

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-62507687245798007972006-11-23T00:57:00.000+01:002006-11-23T14:36:34.167+01:00

Interesting to note that Samuel Pepys, when he died in 1703, had no idea that he was the great diarist of the English language. In his own time he was known as a superb administrator responsible for major developments in the British Navy. Some consider that his major achievement, and the diaries as mere juvenalia (Pepys was 27 when he started, which is not really juvenile I know). Well, perhaps

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9190486551670814790.post-33235659281102828132006-11-23T00:48:00.000+01:002006-11-23T00:55:08.984+01:00

It's not easy being a reader in this day and age. So we need to get together and organise like, er, the women in Margaret Wotsername's thing about Maidservants or whatever. Or you know, like the pigs in Animal Farm, no not the pigs. The ducks!Look, we'll post about books and reading and stuff. Screw this mission statement crap, as Kafka once said, or was it Ken Saro-Wiwa?

Sour Grapesnoreply@blogger.com2