DAILY BLOG
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The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins has been on my To-Be-Read List for a very long time. Considered to be one of the earliest Detective Novels, it is also a regular on lists of the greatest English novels ever written. It is also quite big, 700-800 pages! Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I downloaded the… Read more
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I have reached a place in my reading life where I am trying to fill-in some gaps. Reading some of the classic writers and books deemed important or foundational that I have not yet got around to reading. Anthony Trollope is one such writer. After his death, Henry James, who was not always a fan,… Read more
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More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. In the evenings, after everyone else went… Read more
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The best quote I know about the fickle nature of affection comes from W.B. Yeats. Quoting his father, who may very well have been quoting Balzac, Yeats wrote: “A man does not love a woman because he thinks her clever or because he admires her, but because he likes the way she has of scratching… Read more
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Ireland, pound for pound, has created more great writers than any other county on earth, especially poets. Irish poet Paula Meehan and I have one thing in common. We both lived for a while and went to school in Cheney, Washington. Paula was there for grad school at Eastern Washington University. I was there for… Read more
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“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” — G.K. Chesterton. Happy Thanksgiving! – Mark Read more
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A number of years ago, more years ago than I care to admit, I spent some time reading Emerson’s poetry. My plan at that time was to work systematically through the American poets: Emerson to Whitman to Dickinson to Longfellow and so on. I had already done a similar thing with Irish Poets and thought… Read more
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With the coming of winter, my mind is on outdoor cafes and warmer weather. Here is a picture of an outdoor cafe in Den Haag where I had a cup of coffee one beautiful spring day long ago. Read more
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Like most book lovers, I enjoy reading books about books. I got Michael Dirda’s book, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books, from the local library here as an ebook. Since one of the points Dirda makes early in the book is how he only reads physical copies of books (never ebooks)… Read more
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Years ago I remember reading that Yeats would constantly re-write and re-work even his most famous published poems. At the time I read that, it sounded like the most insane thing I had ever heard. Why go to all the work to make a poem, to get it right, have it set into type and… Read more
ClimbingSky 