Jane Haddam

So, it’s been an interesting world out there while I’ve been wandering around the landscape getting flat tires and trying to figure out how the air conditioning works in a class room with the heat still turned on… I am, as I said before, reading a book, called The Flight of the Intellectuals, by Paul…

So, what can I say? Yesterday was supposed to be a very simple day.  No big deal.  Nothing really scheduled.  Work on the book.  Write a blog post.  Hang out and watch Perry Mason DVDs. But it was a really nice day, and I was restless, so I decided to drive up to Colebrook to…

I don’t know how many of you reading this have been paying attention to the US 24 hour cable news channels, but those of you who have probably know that the Attorney General of the State of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, is in career freefall. I’ve mentioned Dick Blumenthal on this blog before.  I don’t share…

Becauase, of course, as soon as I got out of my office, everything went to hell. At any rate, in honor of the end of the term, I thought I’d pass along the following: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iOHlQuMUF6U9anesMfMGcqEbL1LgD9FKG3R04 God, that looks awful. Anyway, it’s about colleges and remedial courses, and isn’t anything I haven’t said before.  It does…

So, the new book has finally calmed down, as I think of it–it finally feels like a book.  I often have to write entire first drafts and starting cutting into the final before it does that, and the last book didn’t do it at all until I rewrote it from scratch. But this one has,…

So, here’s the thing– I’m having one of those days when I should probably give up and go back to bed.  I got up late, later than I like to.  Then I came in and turned on my electric kettle and set up for tea.  That would normally have been fine, but this morning there…

Every once in a while I have an idea for something and mean to write about it, and then other things get in the way and I forget all about it.  I don’t know what brought this back to my mind.   It’s not like there’s anything about today that’s conducive to thinking about anything.  It’s…

When I first started this blog, I said that narratives build moral universes and ask us to live in them.  That is, narratives create a structure that assumes a set of judgments on the behavior of the characters in them, and invites us to (at least implicitly) accept those judgments, to live for a while…

So, I wasn’t going to post today–too much to do, it’s literally freezing outside, whatever. But I couldn’t help myself. Thomas Hardy.  Thomas HARDY.  Now, there’s somebody I’d call gritty. Robert says I’m the only “English teacher” he’s ever heard admit that she doesn’t like something in the Canon, but now I can double or…

Let me get back to something I’ve talked about before, which actually has a lot to do with my reading Henry James at all, and of my reading The Wings of the Dove at the present half second. I’ve almost always read first and foremost for characters and their relationships with each other, but also…