Books
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I made a mistake in the way I read this book, with the result that I am a little vague about the details of the plot. Well, more than a little, really–I'm usually a little vague about the plot of a detective story. This is part indifference, as long as the story keeps me interested,
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Andy Weir is the author of The Martian, which I have not read. But I have seen the movie of the same name which was based on the book, and quite enjoyed it. The title character is not a sentient extraterrestrial alien being, but rather one of us, stranded alone on Mars when the mission
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The full original title of the novel, as printed on the cover of the original 1836 edition, was The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members. This was shortened to The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club on the
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"Oh damn," said Lord Peter Wimsey… Those are the first words of Whose Body? and I would think that they were pretty bold, shocking or at least startling, in 1923, when the novel first appeared. I may be wrong about that, but the opening suggests to me a certain irreverence toward social convention on the part
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I should not be reading my first Hardy novel in my 70s. It was not by oversight or accident that I have not done it earlier; it was a more or less conscious choice. Back in the early 1970s, when I was still young and more sensitive than I am now, a BBC dramatization of
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Is just “Sayers” enough, or should I have said “Dorothy L. Sayers”? She was particular about the “L,” which stands for “Leigh, her maiden name. Her last name is perhaps right at the threshold of fame where it needs no additional specification. It’s enough for me–I don’t know another literary Sayers–but perhaps not for the
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The fairly small number of Hardy’s poems that I read as an undergraduate have been among my favorites ever since. “The Darkling Thrush,” for instance, is one that I probably think of as often as I think of any poetry, and I made it the first in the 52 Poems series that appeared here in
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Dante's cosmology is intrinsically a stumbling block for the modern reader. Unless some truly astonishing revolution in scientific knowledge takes place, we are, and have been for centuries now, in a position to say that we know that his Ptolemaic system (with Christian modifications) of concentric spheres with earth at the center is incorrect. And
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A few years ago I finally read the entire Divine Comedy. Oops. That was the way I originally started this post. Then I wondered whether "a few" was accurate, and how long it actually had been. And because I had written about it at the time I was able to find the answer. So here's
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The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that I don't know how "Arbuthnot" is to be pronounced. ARbuthnot? ArBUTHnot? Is the "not" even fully pronounced or is the "o" sort of squeezed out, swallowed, as if it were "n't"? I do not know, and these things bother me, in this case every
Light On Dark Water 