Related Post: 10 Big Books I Have Read & Loved While scanning my bookshelves for Big Books I have read, I also found six that I have already read but want to read again. You’d think that once through a Big Book would be enough, but in fact Big Books contain so much that they […]
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Not too long ago, in the book section at Target, I overheard a woman say to her companion, “I stay away from big books.” They walked away, so I didn’t get to hear any more of the conversation, but it made me think about big books. I can imagine many reasons someone might offer for
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Seattle Times critics’ best books of 2015 Critics offer the best books reviewed this year, 16 fiction and 16 nonfiction titles. The best celebrity memoirs of 2015 Writing in The Guardian, Viv Groskop recommends some celebrity memoirs, beginning with: The new trend? The hybrid memoir that is actually a manifesto, a diary, a collection of
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One of the activities that my daily blogging challenge is cutting heavily into is reading. Since I’m not currently adding many new titles to my lifetime reading list, I’m turning to some other lists for a bit of consolation. I think that for next year I’ll have to define for myself a serious reading challenge.
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It’s hard to resist a list. That’s probably why there are so many of them all over the internet. Another reason is that bloggers are encouraged to make use of the list format because it’s one of the most popular formats for blog posts. For some reason, I’ve come across more lists than usual in
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John Fowles, The Art of Fiction No. 109 This article originally appeared in the Summer 1989 issue of The Paris Review. James R. Baker interviews John Fowles, author of, among others, The Collector (1963) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Fowles says that he was heavily influenced by the existentialists. When the interview asks if
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Way back in January 2010 Time magazine drew up a list of “the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME”: All-TIME 100 Novels: The parameters: English language novels published anywhere in the world since 1923, the year that TIME Magazine began, which, before you ask, means that Ulysses (1922) doesn’t make the
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How the Modern Detective Novel Was Born Here Martin Edwards, author of the new book The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story, gives a concise history of the development of the modern detective novel. Authors he discusses include the following: Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle,
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Literary Characters Disturbing the Universe In his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot wrote “Do I dare/disturb the universe?” Erin Haley looks at novels that present characters who dare to ask the same question as Prufrock. The main theme is independence, she says. Such characters “challenge the status quo.” Because challenging
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Here’s Why Famous Authors Chose Their Fake Names For as long as there have been books, there have been authors disguising themselves behind pseudonyms. Some do it for political reasons, others for personal concerns, and some simply for the joy of mischief. In any case, pseudonyms are a tpower tool for writers, allowing their pens
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