Category: Reading
This Is Because That Is…
I am spending my mornings reading the riveting new book by Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. A short while back, I posted a…
Take Charge
Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON: “I have looked into it.” “What (said Elphinston) have you not read it through?” …
While Browsing The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, I Came across This Entry…
Joyce, James (Augustine, Aloysius) (1882-1941) … Upon graduating in 1902, Joyce left for Paris where he lived in poverty, ostensibly studying medicine, actually reading his way through the literature section of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Bodhisattva/Neurotic
Allen wanted to see everything, do everything, and meet everyone. 267 Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg Recently, I have read biographies of Goethe and Proust. Today I finished…
Apt Epigraph for Celia Farber’s Superb Book, “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS”
“But power and greed and corruptible seedSeem to be all that there is” –Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell
One Reader May Suffice
Any author, [Marcel] Proust wrote Jaloux, should be happy to “write for a single, exquisite reader like you,” and he added a Proustian analogy comparing Jaloux’s contact with his book to pollen intended for “a…
A Healing Pleasure
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or…
Which Would You Choose?!
I receive frequent emails from Tablet, including the late afternoon What Happened Today: Scroll. Here is today’s Idea of the Day—