I should start with a couple of things here, just for form’s sake. First,  Mique, who likes Dickens and read him without having to have it assigned at school, is not female.  He’s an Australian male and, if I’m remembering this right, ex-career military.  My point about Dickens has been that you can’t have it…

One of these days I’m going to have to say something about Dickens–although  I’m happy to see that by now, three people who have never been English majors OR English teachers have chimed in to say how much they like him. And by the time Dickens died, he was not only the best selling novelist…

So, before I go bounding into Henry James, let me make a few notes. First is that I truly love the nineteenth century novel, in English and otherwise.  I’ve read French drama and French poetry, and mostly it leaves me cold, but I love Balzac.  I can read Tolstoy even though I think he’s a…

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I was up until midnight last night, which is not usual, and now I’m walking into walls. I’d talk about Henry James, which is on the agenda, except that at the present half second I can’t read Henry James without sort of going  blank in the head. So, still on the…

Well, okay, maybe not. First, let me apologize to JEM–she was the one who posted about the multiple book “authors.” And then let me note to Robert that I wasn’t talking about writers who do two books a year, but writers who do ten.  And I do know all about house names.  The latest phenomenon…

So this is the first Monday in months where I don’t have to jump up and go running off to something, which is nice in a way, but disorienting in others. Due to all that craziness last year, I’m in the middle of finishing a book–the book for next year–at a time when I wouldn’t…

So, it’s a long, lazy, oddly hot Sunday morning, and I’ve gone on to Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind:  The Epidemic of False Knowledge. Okay, I’m feeling too lazy today to go back into the living room and recheck the cover to make sure I’ve got the title right, but that’s about it, and…

It’s Friday, and I actually have something to say, but before I start, I have to admit that I was stuck by the question in the comments yesterday:  do I own a toaster? Well, yes, I do–but interestingly enough, I’ve never bought one.  They’re the kind of thing people give for wedding and housewarming presents,…

In 1959, a British writer named Alan Sillitoe published a short story called “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” in which the narrator and, I think, his brother, turn to a life of juvenile delinquent crime soon after their first exposure to television, whose images of middle class life and middle class “stuff” expose…

So, this is the last Wednesday any time soon when I’m going to be quite this messed up–my Tuesday late nights came to an end yesterday.  So now I’m sitting in the computer lab listening to students to everything except their work, and I’m too tired to think about Benjamin Barber, or Bruce Thornton, either,…