Books
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I have admitted here before that I am an “Indiscriminate Reader.” I read what catches my fancy. And if the book is free, even better. I routinely pick up any Kindle freebies that catch my eye. Over the years, I have found some very enjoyable reads that way. And, to be fair, some very dreadful… Read more
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Sometimes it is easy to forget why we fell in love with books to begin with. This is especially true I think of those of us who were English Majors in college. Honing your ability to analyze books and styles, it becomes all too easy to take your eye off the ball. Ultimately we first… 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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As any reader knows, sometimes you just cannot connect to a book the first or second time you pick it up. Yet if you pick that same book up at a later date and start reading you may actually fall in love with it. I have noticed that music works the same way for me… Read more
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If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity. ~… Read more
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“A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.”― Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa There remain hundreds of books on my reading “to do” list, yet sometimes I find myself re-reading an old favorite. With poetry this is… Read more
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Happy Friday! Here is a quote by Virginia Woolf to carry into your weekend. There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.… Read more
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Like London, Dublin is one of those cities that seems to be filled with literary history. Turn a corner and there you are at some building that some writer once lived in. I was not looking for Sheridan Le Fanu shrines in May of 2020 but by luck just stumbled across this one. It is… Read more
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I must confess that I have become an indiscriminate reader as I have grown older. Early in my reading life, during my teens and 20s, I read exclusively what is commonly referred to as “Literary Fiction” (admittedly a snobbish and parochial term). At some point though that changed. Now, I read whatever fiction catches my… Read more
