Things Fall Apart has been on my bedside table for more than a month, but I am usually so exhausted by bedtime that I don’t even bother to pick it up.
I do not often read debut novels, but I think I will make an exception for John Brandon’s Arkansas.
In The Chronicle Peter Monaghan interviews Chinua Achebe as he looks back at Things Fall Apart and the course of his career.
“In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything,” said J.K. Rowling in a July interview with Meredith Viera on the Today show. I would have preferred that she had said even less in Deathly Hallows than she did, but she’s the Author, and Authors get to make their own Important Decisions About Plots. Rowling has been a curious sort of Author, however, because her resistance to telling everything has weakened like a New Orleans levy the more time has passed.
On the climax of The Golden Bowl.
Anne of Green Gables: lesbian fantasy.
Of course, as soon as I say I can’t write about it while I’m reading, everything changes. The first chapter in Volume 2 of The Golden Bowl is remarkable.
The novel juxtaposes the nuance and subtlety that exists within a tight social network with a bold action that may (or may not) take place precisely because everything else is so subtle.
Incomplete thoughts, offered in light of a notion that novels were the instigation of human rights in Western society.
The next pick for the Oprah Book Club is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road!
Why The Essential Dracula, edited by Leonard Wolf, though fascinating, is unreadable.
My boss loved Philip Roth’s Everyman, she said, because she saw something in it that’s true about aging; she also loved its concise prose. Mom too, who read it the weekend she visited last October, liked it for similar reasons.
Wrapping up The Portrait of a Lady.
If you want this stuff on Portrait of a Lady to end, you best hope I finish it this weekend.
On the villainy of Gilbert Osmond and the structure of a paragraph in The Portrait of a Lady.
It would be more appropriate to call what we often call “cinematic” Jamesian, I wager.
Observations on a conversation between Madame Merle and Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.
