When I was in my teens I read a lot. This was partly because I had always read a lot, and partly because I had a lot of time on my hands, being neither athletically inclined nor socially in demand. For me, there were two kinds of books: "good" books, the kind you got from [...]
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs . . ." So begins The Bell Jar, with an opening sentence that foreshadows events to come. Such a sentence promises the reader we are in for a remarkable story. If only the book lived up to that promise. If only its author [...]
It kept coming to me while reading Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House - the similarities between the chaos, duplicity and treachery taking place in Washington and William Golding's tale of a group of children marooned on a tropical island. Lord of the Flies is a world without grown-ups - as, [...]
When the doctor at the walk-in clinic asked me about my cholesterol, I brushed it off as usual. “I’m fine,” I said. “How do you know?” I told him I’d always been within the normal range for everything – cholesterol, blood pressure, kidney function, blood sugar. I’m a healthy person. I exercise regularly, eat little [...]
Right off the bat I have to tell you that A Confederacy of Dunces is not - I repeat, not - about the American presidency. How could it be? Its author died in 1969, when Donald Trump was 23 ... long before anyone could have predicted that this draft-dodging ladies' man would one day be [...]
Are you old enough to remember the Wayback machine? I mean, before it became the name for an archive of web pages on the internet? The original Wayback machine was a plot device on The Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show; Mr. Peabody, the world's smartest beagle, and his pet boy, Sherman, would set the machine [...]
What is it about coming to the end of one calendar year and beginning a new one that leads us to think our lives are going to improve? We go to bed shortly after midnight brimming with great expectations and too much eggnog, and wake up the next morning the same person, in the same [...]
Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-19th century was an exciting place to be, if you were of a thoughtful bent. For a small town, it was home to a substantial collection of philosophers and writers, the most prominent being Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the leading lights of the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson's neighbours included Henry David [...]
There are those who are born to Austen, and those who come to her over time; I’m one of the latter. I managed to gain an Honours degree in English without reading a single Austen novel. I know – shocking! I had to be told that Clueless was a modern-day updating of Emma, more or [...]
I confess to having a link - an extremely tenuous one, I admit - to the author of The Scarlet Letter. Sarah Averill Wildes, my eighth great-aunt, was hanged on Gallows Hill in Salem, Massachusetts, on the 19th of July, 1692. Her crime, they said, was witchcraft. One of the men who sent her there [...]