I am a book snob. More so than other types of media, as reading a book is a commitment in time and requires more mental effort than listening to music or watching a film/TV. It’s possible to turn off the higher cognitive function of your brain and look at the pretty explosions on the screen for two hours, or ignore the insipid lyrics and dance to the beat for the length of a song.

But reading requires time, comprehension and, at its best, elevates your mind and makes you see the world in a new way.

So when I see someone reading effin Twilight or, God help me, Fifty Shades of Crap , it makes my blood boil.

You’re spending all of that time and energy on something that’s badly written. Reading poorly written prose makes can only damage your own command of the language. The importance of the ability to communicate effectively cannot be stressed enough. It’s the way we find others who share our philosophies and the way we avoid wars.

However, people tend to find faults in others that they possess themselves so when I find something unattractive about another person, I see if that criticism applies to myself.

In this case I must admit that I do things that consume massive quantities of time I’ll never recover, require very little cognitive effort and doesn’t offer improvement as a person. My things are apps on my mobile device. (Hello GetGlue and Curiosity ).

So, read your crap. I promise I won’t roll my eyes in your presence (too much). I even promise I won’t say, ‘Yeah, I waste lots of time doing pointless things, as well.’

And at least when they’re done with wasting their time they have toilet paper. I just have an awesome piece of technology I don’t use to its highest potential.

Title and author: ‘The Terror: A Mystery’ by Arthur Machen

Genre: Literature/Horror

What led you to pick up the book? I wanted to read more Machen and this was the first one on my Kindle

Summarize the plot without revealing the ending. During the first world war people begin dying under mysterious circumstance in remote villages in England and Wales. Each death has a different MO but there are so many they have to be connected somehow. This was during the first war using tanks and planes and there were rumours of weaponized gases so the British put nothing past the Germans. Typical of war-time situations, the British imbued the Germans with near magical abilities, so between new technology and nefarious Germans, they could be targeting innocents all over Great Britain for no reason than to destabilise the country from within.

What did you like most? Machen’s gift for language. Particularly his descriptions of nature and the Welsh countryside. Also the explanation of how everyone had been killed was creative.

What did you dislike? The explanation of the cause behind the killings.

Thoughts on the main character: He was sort of a non-character. Well-written, but mostly there as an intelligent stand-in for the reader. There was nothing outstanding about him.

Opinion on the ending: As I said, I wasn’t crazy about the explanation of the cause, but it made sense from Machen’s p.o.v., as he was quite religious and into spiritualism. Animals in the countryside decided that since humans were becoming animalistic and killing one another horribly then they had no reason to obey humans, as they were no better than animals. Man had forsaken his role of leader and protector and had become one of them. The ability of group-think on this level was explained as something we do not yet understand, as we know very little about the world of the spirits. The ending was also a warning, that, as it stopped as quickly as it started, it could begin again if man decides to act violently towards his fellow man on a scale of WWI

Share some quotes:

—- [Regarding the new technologies of planes and tanks] We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils. [This is applicable with any technology that has incredible power]

—-People seized on this theory largely because it offered at least the comfort of an explanation, and any explanation, even the poorest, is better than an intolerable and terrible mystery.

—-Germany had by this time perpetrated so many horrors and had so excelled in devilish ingenuities that no abomination seemed too abominable to be probable, or too ingeniously wicked to be beyond the tortuous malice of the Hun. [This was written in 1917. Yikes.]

More quotes  here .

Overall rating: 9/10

Check out this article in the NYT about the state of book selling in Germany

I found this bit particularly of interest: “Last year 94,716 new titles were published in German. In the United States, with a population nearly four times bigger, there were 172,000 titles published in 2005.”

Books can’t be discounted (it’s illegal) and their best-seller lists are filled with literary fiction instead of pop crap.

For the writers out there: they have 14,000 publishers.

How difficult is it to learn German?

[This post is from a previous blog. Original post date: 30 October 2007]

Thank You For Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic
001. 5 I learned recently that Cuban cigar-makers, los torcedores, are the most educated segment of Cuba’s population. Rolling cigars by hand is, evidently, tedious and laborious work. The cigar-makers sit on benches, as in school, and spend the whole day rolling leaves of tobacco in their hands. But there is a tradition in Cuba of hiring readers, who sit on a raised platform, hold a book and a microphone in their hands, and read.
002. 14-5 Recently I have done nothing but write book proposals. I took the trouble to write a book proposal for Remembrance of Things Past. It was turned down. Boring, too long, change the title…
Now I’m testing the market. Camouflaged Shakespeare works great. Ulysses got nowhere. Despite my having told it as a soap opera, The Man Without Qualities ended up in the trash. Memoirs of Hadrian too, and The Death of Virgil. All right, I agree, the great European writers were always a bit tedious. But even Hemingway didn’t do any better, although i did mange to sell The Old Man and the Sea. I disguised it a bit. I stressed the ecological aspect of the whole thing. And I changed the old man into a good-looking young Cuban exile, gay. The proposal was immediately accepted.
003. 26-7 Socialist realism was an optimistic and joyous art. Nowhere else was there so much faith in a bright future and the definitive victory of good over evil.
Nowhere except in market-oriented culture. Most of today’s literary production bases its success on the simple socialist-realist ideas of progress. Book store counters are heaped with books which contain one single idea: how to overcome personal disability, how to improve one’s own situation. Books about blind people regaining their sight, fat people becoming thin, sick people recovering, poor people becoming rich, mutes speaking, alcoholics sobering up, unbelievers discovering faith, the unfortunate becoming lucky. All these books infect the reading public with the virus of belief in a bright personal future. And a bright personal future is at the same time a bright collective future, as Oprah Winfrey unambiguously suggests to her impressive world audience.
004. 51 The aura of glamour is, it seems, reserved for only those public activities which create the illusion that everyone has the same access to it.
005. 61-2 The phenomenon of the best-seller is a projection of the collective longing for one book, for the book of books, for a substitute Bible. The longing for one book is deeply anti-intellectual (let us recall that the history of culture begins with tasting that apple from the tree of knowledge!)
006. 62 The best-seller offers a closed system of simple values and even simpler knowledge.
007. 66 In his book Cynicism and Postmodernity, Timothy Bewes maintains that the phenomenon of sincerity is one of the cultural obsessions of our time. At the beginning of the 1990s, the media, measuring the pulse of the market and picking up a longing for semantic transparency, repacked the postmodern zeitgeist as the age of honesty. Thus, concludes Bewes, “sincerity has replaced wit and subtley as the mark of commercial credibility.”
008. 78-9 Recently, out of curiosity, I visited the website of the author of the iconic book The Alchemist. The work, which critics describe as interdenominational, transcendental, and inspirational, is a bag of wind with millions of readers throughout the world. Out of the some two hundred enraptured readers on the web, only two expressed mild reservations about the alchemist’s talent. The skeptics were immediately pounced upon by The Alchemist’s devotees, who asked that Amazon.com deny web access to any such comments.
I wondered why the consumers of victorious products were so fierce and intolerant. … What is it that unites the million-strong army of lovers of The Alchemist… What is it that drives millions of people to shed tears as they watch Titanic…? … I think I know the answer, but I would prefer to keep quite, for the answer makes me tremble with terror.
‘I know perfectly well that the book is shit,’ said a friend of mine, a teacher of literature at a European university, about some book. ‘But I looooove it!’ he howled, drawing out the ‘o’.
‘Americans love junk. It’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love,’ said George Santayana. he said it at a time when he did not yet know that we were all one day going to become Americans.
But still, there is, presumably, something in the very nature of shit that makes it so looooved. And however much the theoreticians of popular culture try to explain why shit ought to be loved, the most attractive aspet of shit is nevertheless its availability. Shit is accessible to everyone, shit is what unites us, we can stumble across shit at every moment, step in it, slip on it, shit follows us wherever we go, shit waits patiently on our doorstep. So who wouldn’t love it! And love alone is the magic formula that can transform shit into gold.
009. 83 In the history of mankind, whenever required, women-witches (literate women) and books (the source of knowledge and pleasure) have been proclaimed the work of the Devil.
In Taylor Hackford’s American film Devil’s Advocate, there is an interesting modern representation of the Devil. The Devil (Al Pacino) and his female crew can be identified by two details: they smoke (no one smokes in America today apart from dark forces!) and they use foreign languages eloquently (the educated are also among the dark forces).
010. 119 In America there is an Indian tribe called the Croatan—which had some difficulty in acquiring the status of North Americans, because there are some indications that they are descended from Dalmation sailors who went astray on the shores of North Carolina and “internationalized” with the local female population.
011. 129 States do not like those who seek papers. Every state, of whatever kind, respects every other state, a bureaucrat respects a bureaucrat. That is why the emigre is punished by a lengthy, tortuous bureaucratic procedure in order to acquire a residence permit. Decent people don’t abandon their states, or their old parents, just like that. Decent people stay at home.
012. 137 They have learned that lesson: it is easy to perform anti-nationalism, but difficult to remain a-national. Even Western Europe will not tolerate that nationally indifferent: the proud West European ideology of multiculturalism wants declared ethnic cultural identities in order to generously grant them the freedom of self-realization.
013. 140 I dream that one day I shall remove the stickers that other people have assiduously attached to me and become just my name.
014. 145 The literary market demands that people adapt to the norms of production. As a rule, it does not tolerate disobedient artists, it does not tolerate experimenters, artistic subversives, performers of strange strategies in a literary text. It rewards the artistically obedient, the adaptable, the diligent, those who respect literary norms. The literary market does not tolerate the old-fashioned idea of a work of art as a unique unrepeatable, deeply individual artistic act. In the literary industry, writers are obedient workers, just a link in the chain of production.
015. 145 …good writers feel banished wherever they are, and only bad writers feel at home everywhere.
016. 150 There’s nothing much to love in the silent [people] , either, the ones who are neither fish nor fowl. You never know what they are thinking, and in the end they always turn out to have been right.
017. 151 … every thinking individual has the right to interfere, including intellectuals.
018. 153 There are cynics who hold that politics today is open to everyone: if actors, criminals, writers, mobsters, fools and murderers can become president, then politics itself is no longer a particularly serious discipline.
019. 153 There are secret addicts who seek the thrill of powerful emotions and bloody experiences, and war is certainly the bloodiest.
020. 153 However, a subtle chemical reaction has taken place in reality, and reality is no longer what it was. It has been irradiated by the media, and as is generally the case with radiation, the damage becomes visible only when it is already too late.
021. 155 Through media contamination, a real event is fictionalized (what an old-fashioned word!), for that is the only way it can be consumed, de-realized (deprived of its reality), and hyper-realized (made more real than reality itself). It begins to function the same way as the texts of popular culture so (movies, TV shows, cartoons, trivial literature, celebrities and so on). Sometimes a real event actually becomes text of popular culture. In order for this to happen, the text of mass culture must be producerly; it must stimulate and produce meaning, bring them into conflict, engage and activate the emotions of the consumers, question but also confirm the fundamental set of values which consumers have. In that sense, not every event has the potential to function as a text of mass culture. Just as not every text does either.
022. 156-7 The media, television in particular, transform events into entertainment, simply because entertainment, and not information, has become the engine of mass media. Media presentation has reduced American trials (O.J. Simpson) and American political life (the case of Clinton) to mass amusement. Of course, it is precisely as amusement that political life achieves the extreme point of its democracy (or the extreme point of its illusion of democracy).
023. 159 …a moral tax should be levied on those who take on a moral role. So from humanists above all.
024. 159 The media intellectual will become a celeb, a person without substance or rather of changeable substance, a person to whom media consumers attribute meaning.
025. 161 To talk about kitsch became impolite at the very moment when the world itself was turning kitsch. Notice that Kafka writes about the bureaucracy at times when the bureaucracy is still almost an innocent creature. Later on, when it swallowed our lives, it became self-evident and thus invisible…The point I want to make is this: the only time when one can recognize a phenomenon in all its horror is when it is still new. –Milan Kundera
026. 162-3 The intellectuals, who had been given full freedom for intellectual discourse—and intellectual discourse, let us remember, “remains one of the most authentic forms of resistance to manipulation and a vital affirmation of the freedom of thought,” as Pierre Bourdieu writes in his book On Television—missed their opportunity. They had the chance to dominate the medium, but the medium of TV, Bourdieu’s “space for narcissistic exhibitionism,” dominated them instead. Within the group itself, relations of power were immediately established: the fast thinkers (Bourdieu’s term) spoke and the slower ones tried to catch their breath. The former created “a field of forces, a force field,” which “contains people who dominate and others who are dominated.” Having secured the space, the fast thinkers continued to talk about trivial matters, using the rhetoric of discoverers. Those who did not want to adapt, or could not adapt, to the tone and topics which had been imposed remained silent.
027. 166 The intellectual today is a socialite who adapts to political, cultural, and intellectual mainstream trends and represents what is expected of every decent thinking person.
028. 167: The intellectual today means above all to be boring. Both of the Germans quoted, who condemn contemporary German literature, use a typical repertoire of accusations; highbrow, incomprehensible, melancholy, no fun.
029. 170 ‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that here would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us,” wrote the apocalyptic Nel Postman, adding that Huxley was right.
030. 189 The global cultural market so rapidly and enthusiastically appropriates the intellectual trends of our time—postcolonialism, feminism, multiculturalism, identity politics—that one sometimes wonders whether the market itself invents intellectual trends in order to make a profit.
031. 195 In the globalized world, individuals feel their insignificance more than ever before. That is why everyone loudly trumpets his own sound and no one listens to anyone else. Listening is, they say, submission to the dominance of another. Speech is the realization of personal freedom and, therefore, dominance over those who agree to be dominated.
032. 195 The global noise is indescribable. Even angels, whose job description includes patience and compassion, walk around with cotton balls in their ears. The only acceptable aesthetic choice that remains for people of good taste is silence.
033. 203 Suddenly it turns out that we are living in an age when everyone has the right to a voice but no one listens.
034. 203-4 … many serious writers are convinced that their ability to penetrate the market is a measure of their quality. Readers are equally convinced. And publishers zealously nourish that conviction.
035. 205 The individual voice is increasingly rare. Every voice, every text, is slotted into the market niche of the moment, the buzzword of the moment, the codes of the market. In order to be heard and understood, the writer consciously or unconsciously adapts his voice to the demands of the market, to his potential readers at that moment. Even if it never occurs to him, even if he refuses, this translation into the language of the market happens without his control: in the market itself, in reception, in reading.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
001. Along with preadolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. [PN: Topography of life's reading.] …how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there. [PN: Why people read: escape or home (?)] … Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing [sic] .
002. …a confrontation with the mystery of time. [PN: Unlike some people who claim a love of language, Prose actually documents (?) it.]
003. …ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written. [PN: ??]
004. …Afraid of running out of books, I decided to slow myself down by reading Proust in French. [PH: That'd do it.]
005. [Regarding writing after reading inspiring work.] It’s like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps.
006. I’ve also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I’ve always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it had meant that I couldn’t read for the years it might take to complete a novel.
To be truthful, there are writers who will stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light.
007. Usually, I would teach one creative writing workshop each semester, together with a literature class entitled something like “The Modern Short Story”–a course designed for undergraduates who weren’t planning to major in literature or go on to graduate school and so would not be damaged by my inability to teach literary theory.
008. Close reading helped me figure out, as I hoped it did for me students, a way to approach a difficult aspect of writing, which is nearly always difficult. [PN: Allow other authors to do the teaching. Since they couldn't be here—Prose translates.] They are the teachers to whom I go.
009. Let’s say you are facing the challenges of populating a room with a large cast of characters all talking at once. Having read the ballroom scene in Anna Karenina, or the wild party that winds through so many pages of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, you have sources to which you can go not just for inspiration but for technical assistance.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster

001.’Language of Reading’ A grammar of literature, a set of conventions and patterns, codes and rules, that we learn to employ in dealing with a piece of writing.
002. [What Lit Profs think when reading] Where did that effect come from? Whom does this character resemble? Where have I seen this situation before? Didn’t Dante (or Chaucer, or Merle Haggard) say that? … Memory, Symbol, Pattern – the three chief things profs read for.
003. Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.
004. Pattern recognition – Most professional students of literature learn to take in the foreground detail while seeing the patterns that the detail reveals. [This is something I need to work on—I see it when someone points it out to me, but nearly never see it on my own.]
005. Chapter One: Every Trip is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)
Quests consist of: a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route and a real reason to go there.
-The real reason for the quest NEVER involves the stated reason. Typically, the quester fails at the stated task. … They go because they mistakenly think the stated task is the real task, but their real mission is educational—it’s about themselves.
-The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.
-Greatest quest novel of the last century: Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49.
006. “Always” and “never” are not words that have much meaning in literary study.
007. Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion
whenever people eat or drink together it’s communion – communion can signify many things other than holy communion, just as the word ‘intercourse’ can mean a variety things other than ‘sexual’.
008. In the real world, breaking bread with others is an act of peace and sharing. The act of taking food into our bodies is so personal we don’t want to share it with people with whom we’re uncomfortable.
009. In literature there are other reasons—there have to be because writing a scene around a meal is so difficult and inherently uninteresting if something else isn’t going on beneath the surface then you risk boring or confusing your reader.
010. The only reason to give a character a serious hang up is to give him the chance to get over it. He may fail, but he gets the chance. [This is similar to the quester/stated goal thing mentioned in the previous post. It's about the journey, not the destination.]
011. Sharing of any communal food, drink, even drugs is symbolic of communion.
012. Missed or failed meals are, likewise, indicative of the the bad/strained/difficult relationship between the characters.
013. Excellent examples of dinner scenes:
a. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler,
b. “The Dead” by James Joyce
c. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
d. “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver
014. Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires: Things vampires are about other than literal vampirism: selfishness, exploitation, refusal to respect the autonomy of other people… This also applies to other scary figures: ghosts and doppelgangers
015. Ghosts in lasting ghost stories (as opposed to naïve ghost stories, which ARE just about a ghost) are about something other than malevolent spirits
Examples: Hamlet’s father is there to point out something drastically wrong in the royal household; Marley’s ghost is an ethics lesson for Scrooge; Dr Jekyll’s other half is there to show that even a respectable man has a dark side.
Authors who use this a lot: Robert Louis Stevenson, Dickens, Stoker, J.S. Le Fanu, Henry James. Why the Victorians so much? Because they could write directly about sex and sexuality they found ways of transforming those taboo subjects into other forms. The Victorians were masters of sublimation.
016. The ghosts and vampires don’t always have to appear in visible forms—sometimes the scariest ones are human. The Turn of the Screw is one of the best examples. It could be about a governess trying to protect her two charges from the ghost that’s possessing them, or it could be about an insane governess who only -thinks- the children are being possessed, or… either way, the ‘ghost’ isn’t visible. It may be a real ghost or it may be a psychological delusion.
017. Henry James’ “Daisy Miller” is a classic vampire story—young, virginal Daisy Miller is consumed and destroyed by Mr Winterbourne. Daisy—Spring, fresh, new, alive and Winter—old, dying, cold.
018. Other 19th century writers big on vampires—E.A. Poe and Thomas Hardy. Tess in -Tess of the D’Urbervilles- is table fare for the men in her life.
019. Kafka uses social vampirism and cannibalism in “The Metamorphosis” and “A Hunger Artist” where, in a nifty reversal of the traditional vampire narrative, crowds of onlookers watch as the artist’s fasting consumes him.
020. Other examples: Innocent Erendira by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; D.H. Lawrences “The Fox” and -Women in Love-; Iris Murdoch: pick a novel, any novel.
021. The signature is the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else. – Using people to get what we want.
022. The signature is the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else. – Using people to get what we want.
023. Sonnets – fourteen lines long and roughly ten syllables wide = square.
024. Type 1: Petrarchan: Two parts to a sonnet—a section of eight lines and a section of six lines; each section has its own rhyme scheme
Type 2: Shakespearean: first four rhyme, next four rhyme, third four rhyme, last two rhyme.
025. One of the biggest keys to reading like a prof is pattern recognition and that is mostly down to practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences. … it’s a matter of learning to look and knowing where and how to look.
026. Fiction writers don’t just borrow from other fiction—they borrow from history, as well.
027. Dialogue between old texts and new is always going on at one level or another. Critics speak of this dialogue as intertextuality; the ongoing interaction between poems or stories. … Newer works are having a dialogue with older ones, and they often indicate the presence of this conversation by invoking the older texts with anything from oblique references to extensive quotations.
028. What do we do if we don’t see all these correspondences?
Don’t worry: If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it. The characters have to work as characters, as themselves. If the story is good but you don’t catch allusions and references and parallels, then you’ve done nothing worse than read a good story with memorable characters.
029. Writers find themselves engaged in a relationship with older writers; of course, that relationship plays itself out through the texts, the new one emerging in part through earlier texts that exert influence on the writer in one way or another.
030. The naming of a character is a serious piece of business in a novel or play. A name has to sound right for a character—but it also has to convey whatever message the writer want to convey about the character of the story.
031. Even people that aren’t Biblical scholars can sometimes recognize a biblical allusion. Forster uses something he calls the ‘resonance test’. If I hear something on in a text that seems to be beyond the scope of the story’s or poems immediate dimensions, if it resonates outside itself, I start looking for allusions to older and bigger texts.
032. The “literary canon”, by the way, is a master list of works that everyone pretends doesn’t exist (the list, not the works) but that we all know matters in some important way.
033. Fairy tales are useful because they’re the only sure fire stories that everyone knows. You can’t count on your audience knowing Shakespeare, Homer or Joyce.
034. We’re not trying to recreate the fairy tale here. Rather, we’re trying to make us of details and patterns, portions of some prior story (or, once you start really thinking like a professor, “prior text”, since everything is a text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers’ deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales. So use as much or as little as you want.
035. Myths are the shaping and sustaining power of story and symbol. It’s a body of story that matters, of the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways physics, philosophy, mathematics and chemistry can’t.
036. That explanation takes the shape of stories that are deeply ingrained in our group memory, that shape our culture and are in turn shaped by it, that constitute a way of seeing by which we read the world and, ultimately, ourselves.
037. In this activity of reading and understanding literature, we’re chiefly concerned with how that story functions as material for literary creators, the way in which it can inform a story or poem, and how it is perceived by the reader.
038. Homer gives us four great struggles of the human being: with nature, with the divine, with other humans, and with ourselves. What is there, after all, against which we need to prove ourselves but those four things?

055. Writers are men and women who are interested in the world around them. That world contains many things, and on the level of society, part of what it contains is the political reality of the time.
056. Knowing a little something about the social and political milieu out of which a writer creates can only help us understand her work.

30 begins here

55 begins here

end bit

Nostalgia about nostalgia about nostalgia.

I was fiddling around on my computer and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” comes on my mp3 player and I’m instantly thirteen. Smell is supposed to be most closely linked to memory but when I hear certain songs I may as well jump in a time machine, so much do some songs put me right back in the frame of mind I was in when said song was ubiquitous.

It’s fitting that the song that set me off this time was Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, a list song he wrote about the key world events occurring in his lifetime. I was born nearly thirty years after Mr Joel (him = May 09, 1949 me = June 09 1978) but his song about his childhood defines my childhood. I ‘came of age’ when his song of coming of age was popular. I know every word of the song even though the vast majority of the events happened before I was born.

I’ve always prided myself on differing from my peers by not caring about age difference but recently it has occurred to me just how important certain events can be to people. One day I will meet a person who wasn’t born when 9/11 happened and I will be baffled; just as people who were alive when JFK was assassinated feel when they talk to people my age. When that happens I’ll feel as I do now about JFK people: that it’s such a defining moment I can’t believe I don’t have a memory of it. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t a sentient being then–I should remember something like that. I’ll feel that way about future pro-9/11 kids. Nostalgia is like a supremely bizarre LSD trip.

This whole thing has been exacerbated by a project I was working on for one of my bosses where I needed to find sites with lists of things people in their sixties had seen invented as well as things people in their 20s had never lived without. I discovered The People History which lists useful info for each year in U.S. history, as well as Wikipedia’s Years in Literature which has lists of popular books for any given year. They also have music. It’s fascinating, addictive stuff. And normally I believe in connection across generational differences. but after poking around on some of these sites I can see how some people would only want to be with those they could identify with chronologically. In twenty years I don’t know if I could be interested (emotionally/intimately) in a person who had no concept of 9/11, even though I’m no patriot. The whole project has made me think, which I appreciate.

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10 Myths About Introverts: Quotes
26a by Diana Evans: Quotes
78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published by Pat Walsh: Review

A

A.S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Short Stories by A.S. Byatt: Review
About Grace by Anthony Doerr: Review
Abraham: A Journey Through Three Faiths by Bruce Feiler: Review
Acid Row by Minette Walters: Review
Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ; Quotes
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell: Review
Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressman Taylor: Review
An Advancement of Learning by Reginald Hill: Review
Affinity by Sarah Waters: Review
After Delores by Sarah Schulman: Review
Agnes Gray by Anne Bronte: Review ; Quotes
‘Albert Nobbs’ by George Moore: Quotes
The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo: Review
The Alienist by Caleb Carr: Review
All Men are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir: Review
Alma Mater by Rita Mae Brown: Review
‘Alone’ by E.A. Poe: Poem
‘The Altar of the Dead’ by Henry James: Quotes
Alva and Irva by Edward Carey: Quotes
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: Review
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis: Review
American Virgin by Steven Seagle: Review
Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strouf: Review
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton: Quotes
Another Planet by Elinor Burkett: Review
Anthem by Ayn Rand: Quotes
The Art of Fiction by David Lodge: Review   Quotes
The Art of Fiction by John Gardner: Quotes
‘Art of Killing—the Literary Merits of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac’   by Joel T. Terranova: Quotes
The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene: Quotes
The Art of War by Sun-Tzu (Thomas Cleary): Quotes
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes: Review
As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg: Review
Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster: Quotes
‘The Assignation’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
‘The Assignation’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Claire Morrall: Review
The Asylum by Patrick McGrath: Review
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances by Alexander McCall Smith: Review
Atonement by Ian McEwan: Review ;  Quotes 
‘The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table’ by Oliver Wendell Holmes: Quote
Autumn of the Phantoms by Yasmina Khadra: Review

B

Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast by Bill Richardson: Quotes
‘The Balloon-Hoax’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Baloney Detection’ by Michael Shermer: Quotes
Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins: Quotes
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison: Review
Batman: Nevermore by Len Wein and Guy Davis: Review
Baudelaire on Poe: Critical Papers trans and ed by Lois and Francis Hyslop: Quotes
Before the Frost by Henning Mankell: Review
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson: Review
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: Quotes
Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ; Quotes
‘Berenice’ by E.A. Poe:   Quotes
Between Women by Sharon Marcus: Quotes
Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche: Quotes
The Bibliognost’s Handbook by Ben Schott: Quotes
Bill Bryson’s African Diary by Bill Bryson: Review
A Bit on the Side by William Trevor: Review
‘The Black Cat’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Black Fairy Tale by Otsuichi: Review ; Quotes
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell: Review
Bleak House by Charles Dickens: Review
Bless Your Heart, Tramp! by Celia Rivenbark: Review
‘The Blind Man’ by D.H. Lawrence: Quotes
‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield: Quotes
Blood: Misc Info
Blood Spatter Analysis: Information
Bluestockings: Misc Info
The Bone People by Keri Hulme: Quotes
Bonk by Mary Roach: Quotes
The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson: Review
‘The Book-Bag’ by William Somerset Maugham: Quotes
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: Review
Bookaholism: Quotes
Booked to Die by John Dunning: Review
The Bookman’s Wake by John Dunning: Review
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald: Review
Boston Marriages and Romantic Friendships from Wikipedia: Quotes
Boston Marriages by Esther Rothblum and Kathleen A. Brehony: Quotes
The Bostonians by Henry James: Quotes
The Box by Gunter Grass: Review
The Brain: Misc Info
The Breaker by Minette Walters: Review
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier: Review
Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich: Quotes
Britain: Culture Smart! by Paul Norbury: Quotes
Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown: Review
‘The Business Man’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes

C

‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ by M.R. James: Quotes
‘Caring for Your Introvert’ by Jonathan Rausch: Full Article
‘Carmilla’ by Sheridan le Fanu: Quotes
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson: Review
‘The Cask of Amontillado’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Casting the Runes by M.R. James: Quotes
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole: Quotes
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: Quotes
The Catastrophist by Lawrence Douglas: Quotes
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman: Review
The Celibacy Club by Janice Eudice: Review
Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte Leautremont: Quotes
Charles Addams’ Comics: Comics
‘Charon’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte: Review
Cobwebs from an Empty Skull by Ambrose Bierce: Quotes
‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’: Quotes
Coma: Misc Info
Come Together by Emlyn Rees and Josie Lloyd: Review
Commonplacing: Misc Info
Complications by Atul Gawande: Review
Compulsion by Meyer Levin: Quotes
The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer: Review
Convent Girls edited by Jackie Bennett: Review
‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Count Magnus’ by M.R. James: Quotes
The Court of Cacus or the Story of Burke and Hare by Alexander Leighton: Quotes
Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym: Quotes
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevski: Quotes
Criminology Statistics: Quotes
Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins: Reviews
‘The Cross of Snow’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poem
‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’ by Ted Hughes: Poem
Crush by Jane Futcher: Review
The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen: Review ; Quotes
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon: Review

D

Damage by Josephine Hart: Review
Darkness Visible by William Styron: Quotes
Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay: Quotes
The Dead of Jericho by Colin Dexter: Review , Quotes
Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay: Review Quotes
‘Death and Odysseus’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
‘Death and the Orange’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
‘A Death of One’s Own’ by Vanessa Grigoriadia: Quotes
‘The Death Bed’ by Siegfried Sassoon: Poem
Death Note by Ohba: Review
The Defence by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ; Quotes
Depths by Henning Mankell: Quotes
Depraved by Harold Schechter: Quotes
‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Description of a Struggle’ by Franz Kafka: Quotes
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ; Quotes
Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay: Review   Quotes
Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig: Review ; Quotes
The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: Quotes
The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley: Quotes
‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’ by M.R. James: Quotes
Diary of a Seducer by Soren Kierkegaard: Quotes
Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin: Review
The Divine Economy of Salvation by Pricila Uppal: Review
The Diviner’s Tale by Bradford Morrow: Review
‘The Domain of Arnheim’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris: Quotes
‘The Duc du L’Omelette’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Dust of Snow’ by Robert Frost: Poem

E

Easter Rising by Michael Patrick MacDonald: Review
Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss: Quotes
Edward Gorey Comics: Quotes and Notes
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery: Quotes
‘Eleonora’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Emily Dickinson Poetry: Poems
Emily Stone by Anne Redmon: Review
Emotion by Dylan Evans: Quotes
The Empire of Death by Paul Koudounaris: Quotes
‘The Empty House’ by Algernon Blackwood: Quotes
The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
Encyclopaedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal: Review
English is Tough Stuff: Poem
Erotic Refugees by Paddy Kelly: Review
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer: Review
Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley: Quotes
Evil Overlord List: List
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym: Review ; Quotes
‘The Exiles’ by Ray Bradbury: Review ;  Quotes
Existentialism: Misc Quotes
Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction: Quotes
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer: Review
The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde: Review 

F

Face of Trespass by Ruth Rendell: Quotes
The Fall of the House of Usher by E.A. Poe: Quotes
The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter: Review
Fight Club by Chuck Palahnuik: Quotes
Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth R. Miller: Review ;  Quotes
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs by Alexander McCall Smith: Review
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: Review
The Finishing School by Muriel Spark: Review
The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte: Review
Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire: Selections
‘The Fox’ by D.H. Lawrence: Review
F*ck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way by John S. Parkin: Review
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel: Review
Future Files by Richard Watson: Review
Future Minds by  Richard Watson: Review ; Quotes

G

‘The Garden of Allah’ by Don Henley: Lyrics
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers: Review ; Quotes
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos: Quotes
Get Anyone to Do Anything by David J. Lieberman: Quotes
Ghost Girl by Torey Hayden: Review
Ghost Story by Peter Straub: Fiction
The Ghost Writer by John Harwood: Review
The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist: Review ;  Quotes
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls: Review
Glory by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
God Save the Queen by Mike Cary: Review
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: Quotes
‘The Gold-Bug’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Goodnight Steven McQueen by Louise Wener: Review
Goth by Otsuichi: Review ; Quotes
The Goth Bible by Nancy Kilpatrick: Review   Quotes
Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam: Review ; Quotes
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: Quotes
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: Review
‘Green Tea’ by Sheridan le Fanu: Quotes
Greetings from Hellville by Thomas Ott: Review
‘The Guest’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes

H

Halloween Poetry: Poems
The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood: Quotes
Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger: Review
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky: Fiction
The Haunted Looking Glass edited by Edward Gorey: Review
Hawthorne Effect: Quote
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers: Review ;  Quotes
Hell with the Lid Taken Off: River of Mud by Lee Adam Herold: Review ; Quotes
Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Copeland: Review
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby: Review
A History of Celibacy by Elizabeth Abbott: Review
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: Review ; Quotes
A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham: Review ; Quote
‘Hop-Frog’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
A House to Let by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskill and Adelaide Anne Procter: Quotes
The Hours by Michael Cunningham: Review
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson: Review
How I Became Stupid by Martin Page: Review ; Quotes
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton:  Review
‘How to Detect Fallacious Arguments’ by Michael Shermer: Quotes
How to Dissolve a Human Body: Information
‘How to Identify and Nurture Young Writers’ by James Michener: Quotes
How to Pick Locks: Information
How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster: Quotes
How to Sharpen Knives: Information
The Hum Bug by Harold Schechter: Review
The Human Predator by Katherine Ramsland: Quotes

I

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith: Review
I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight by Margaret Cho: Review
I Know You’re Out There by Michael Beaumier: Quotes
I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson: Review
I’m Not Crazy, I’m Just Not You by Roger Pearman, et al: Review ; Quotes
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov: Quotes
The Ice House by Minette Walters: Review
‘The Imp of the Perverse’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘The Importance of Childhood’ by Joyce Carol Oates: Quotes
Impression Management: Quotes
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson: Review
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: Review
In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John Marzluff: Quotes
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch: Review
The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle: Review
Inseparable by Emma Donoghue: Review Quotes
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Banks: Review
Instances of the Number Three by Salley Vickers: Review
The Interpretation of Murder by Jeb Rubenfeld: Review
In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe by Jonathan Scott Fuqua, Steven Parke and Stephen John Phillips: Review
Inventing Elliot by Graham Gardner: Review
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ;  Quotes
‘Island of the Fay’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Its Enclosure’ by Wordsworth: Poem

J

Jean-Christophe Volume 1 by Romain Rolland: Quotes
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard: Quotes
Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell: Quotes

K

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction: Quotes
King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ;  Quotes
Kissing Jessica Stein Monologue: Jessica’s Monologue

L

The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: Review ;  Quotes
‘The Landscape Garden’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ;  Quotes
‘Leila’ by Nelly Rosaria: Quotes
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke: Quotes
Librarians [Readerville article] : Quotes
Lifeguarding by Catherine McCall: Review
Literature Abuse: Quotes
The Little Book of Neuroses by Michael Thomas Ford: Review
Little Children by Tom Perotta: Quotes
‘The Little City’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt: Review ;  Quotes
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: Quotes
The Lobotomist by Jack El-Hai: Quotes
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner: Quotes
Look at the Harlequins by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
‘Looking for the Spark’ by Joanna Trollope: Quotes
‘Loss of Breath’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Lost Hearts’ by M.R. James: Quotes
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde: Review
The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo: Quotes
Lying Awake by Marc Salzman: Review

M

Macbeth by William Shakespeare: Quotes
Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs: Review
‘The Man of the House’ by Ethel Colburn Mayne: Quotes
The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey: Review
‘The Man That was Used Up’ by E.A Poe: Quotes
‘Martin’s Close’ by M.R. James: Quotes
Mary by Vladimir Nabokov: Review ;  Quotes
Mary George of Allnorthover by Lavinia Greenlaw: Review
‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
A Meddler and Her Murder by Joyce Porter: Review
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: Quotes
‘Mellonta Tauta’ by E.A.Poe: Quotes
Melymbrosia by Virginia Woolf: Quotes
‘Men see that’ poem by William Motherwell: Poem
The Mentor by Sebastian Stuart : Quotes
‘Mesmeric Revelation’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘The Metamorphosis’ by Kafka: Quotes
‘Mezzo Cammin’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poem
‘The Mezzotint’ by M.R. James: Quotes
Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford: Quotes
The Monk: Review
Monster: Oil on Canvas by Dmitry Zlotsky: Review
‘Morella’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance’ by M.R. James: Quotes
Monologues
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin: Review
Mr Phillips by John Lancaster: Review
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: Review
‘MS Found in a Bottle’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
The Mummy at the Dining Room Table by Jeffrey Kotler: Review
Murder Being Done Once by Ruth Rendell: Review
‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinseon by Alfred Habegger: Review ;   Quotes
My American Unhappiness by Dean Bakapoulos: Review ; Quotes
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon: Review ; Quotes
‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers by Stephanie Levine: Review

N

Naked by David Sedaris: Quotes
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: Review ;  Quotes
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson: Review ; Quotes
Never Be Lied to Again by David J. Lieberman: Quote
‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Nevermore’ by E.A. Poe: Poem
Nevermore by Harold Schechter: Quotes
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman: Review
The New Gothic [Intro] by Bradford Morrow & Patrick McGrath: Quote
The New Sins by David Byrne: Quotes
‘Night’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poem
The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin: Review
‘Night Scene’ by Paul Verlaine: Poem
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters: Review
The Nightingale Papers by David Nokes: Quotes
Nihilism: Misc Quotes
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers: Review Quotes
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen: Review
No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym: Review ; Quotes
The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon: Quotes
Not Even Wrong by Paul Collins: Review ; Quotes
Not in Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker: Quotes
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson: Review
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevski: Quotes
Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller: Quotes
A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse: Quotes
‘Number 13′ by M.R. James: Quotes

O

Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgrim: Review ; Quotes
‘The Oblong Box’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Odd Deaths: List
Off Camera by Ted Koppel: Review
Oh, Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet: Quotes
‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ by M.R. James: Quotes
‘Old English Poetry’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
The Old Limey by H.W. Crocker: Quotes
‘Ollala’ by Robert Louis Stevenson: Quotes
On Agate Hill by Lee Smith: Review
One’s Company by Barbara Holland: Review
Only Begotten by Gary Glass: Review
The Only Bush I Trust is My Own by Periel Aschenbrand: Review
Other Girls by Diane Ayres: Review
Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas: Review
Outline of My Lover by Douglas Martin: Review
‘The Oval Portrait’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Ovando’ by Jamaica Kincaide: Quotes
Over 50 Singles Night by Ellyn Bache: Review
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology: Quotes
The Oxford History of Britain by Kenneth O. Morgan: Quotes
The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez: Review
Oxford Studies in Modern European Culture: The Papin Sisters by Rachel Edwards and Keith Reader: Quotes
‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelly: Poem
‘Ozymandias’ by Horace Smith: Poem

P

The Package Included Murder by Joyce Porter: Review
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach: Quotes
Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg: Review
Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller: Review
Pedro and Me by Judd Winick: Review
Perfume by Patrick Suskind: Quotes
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steve Chbosky: Review
Petropolis by Anya Ulinich: Quotes
The Philosopher’s Demise by Richard Watson: Review
‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
The Photograph by Penelope Fitzgerald: Quotes
Pinkerton’s Sister by Peter Rushforth: Review
Piranha to Scurvy by Ruth Rendell: Review
Plan B by Anne Lamott: Review
The Platform of Time by Rosenbaum and Virginia Woolf: Quotes
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
‘Poe Posthumous’ by Joyce Carol Oates: Review ;  Quotes
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl: Quotes
Poisonous Plants: Information
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby: Review
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth: Review
Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith: Review
‘The Prayer of the Flowers’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith: Quotes
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark: Review
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli: Quotes
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy: Review
‘Psycho Killer’ by David Byrne: Lyrics
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson: Quotes
Pure by Rebbecca Ray: Review
Purity by Douglas Clegg: Review ; Quotes
‘The Purloined Letter’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes

Q

Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey: Review ; Quotes
The Quincunx by Michael Palliser: Review ; Quotes

R

‘The Raft Builders’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
Rameau’s Niece by Cathleen Schine: Review
Rare Beasts by Charles Ogden: Review
A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers: Review
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose: Quotes
Readings by Michael Dirda: Review
‘The Real Depression Story’ by Peter D. Kramer: Quotes
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov: Quotes
The Realm of Possibility by David Leviathan: Review
‘The Residence at Whitminster’ by M.R. James: Quotes
Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams: Review
The River King by Alice Hoffman: Review
The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle: Quotes
‘Romantic Friendships: So, Are You Two Together?’: Quotes
‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ by Sheridan le Fanu: Quotes
‘The Room in the Tower’ by E.F. Benson: Quotes
‘The Rose Garden’ by M.R. James: Quotes
Rose of No Man’s Land by Michelle Tea: Review
The Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska: Review
Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Quotes
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis: Review
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs: Review

S

Saturday by Ian McEwan: Review ; Quotes
The Sea and the Silence by Peter Cunningham: Review
‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats: Poem
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir: Quotes
The Secret History by Donna Tartt: Review ; Quotes
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neill McKenna: Review ; Quotes
‘The Secret Sharer’ by Joseph Conrad: Quotes
‘The Seduction of the Text’ by Francine du Plessix Gray: Quotes
Self-Made Man by Nora Vincent: Review
The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter: Review ; Quotes
Serial Killers: Misc Info
Sex with the Queen by Eleanor Herman: Quotes
‘Seven Wives, Seven Prisons’ by L.A. Abbott: Quotes
The Shape of Snakes by Minette Walters: Review
‘The Shout’ by Robert Graves: Quotes
Sickened by Julie Gregory: Review
‘Silence, a Fable’ by E.A. Poe: Entire Story
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris: Review
The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace: Quotes
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert: Review ;  Quotes
Sixpence House by Paul Collins: Review
Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut: Review ;  Quotes
Slow News Day by Andi Watson: Review
Small Island by Andrea Levy: Review
Smothered Dolls by A.J. Morlan: Review
Snobs by Julian Fellowes: Review
Snow by Orhan Pamuk: Quotes
So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid: Review ; Quotes
The Society of Others by William Nicholson: Review ;  Quotes
Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout: Review
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde: Review
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury: Quotes
‘The Songless Country’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
The Sophie Horowitz Story by Sarah Schulman: Review
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner: Review
Southern Ladies and Gentlemen by Florence King: Quotes
‘Spellbound’ by Emily Bronte: Poem
‘The Sphinx’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Spinoza’s Dictum: Definition
‘Spider Baby’ by Fantomas: Lyrics
Spiderweb by Penelope Lively: Fiction
Spook by Mary Roach: Review
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon: Review
‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James: Quotes
‘Stir the fire till it lowe’ poem by George Croly: Poem
Stoicism: Misc Quotes
The Stranger by Albert Camus: Quotes
Stranger Than Fiction by Chuck Palahnuik: Review
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith: Quotes
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse: Review
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert: Review
Successful Non-Verbal Communication: Quotes
The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson: Review
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky: Quotes
Summer, Fireworks and My Corpse by Otsuichi: Review ; Quotes
Sway by Brafman and Brafman: Quotes

T

T for Trespass by Sue Grafton: Quotes
Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss: Review
‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
The Tender Land by Kathleen Finneran: Review
The Terror: A Mystery by Arthur Machen: Review ;  Quotes
Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic: Quotes
Thanksgiving by Michael Dibdin: Review
That’s Why They’re in Cages, People! by Joel Kelly: Review
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington: Review
Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin: Quotes
Thirteen Steps Down by Ruth Rendell: Review
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield: Quotes
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: Quotes
The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark by Christopher Meades: Review
‘The Three Impostors’ by Arthur Machen: Quotes
‘Time and the Tradesman’ by Lord Dunsany: Notes
The Time Keeper by Kevin Cropp: Review
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass: Review ; Quotes
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters: Review
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare: Quotes
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: Review
Tom Bedlam by George Hagen: Quotes
‘The Tomb’ by H.P.Lovecraft: Quotes
Toothpaste for Dinner by Drew: Review
‘The Tractate Middoth’ by M.R. James: Quotes
‘The Treasure of Abbott Thomas’ by M.R. James: Quotes
The Trial by Kafka: Quotes
The Trial of True Love by William Nicholson: Review  [ another review ]; Quotes
Turbulent Souls by Stephen Dubner: Review

U

An Underground Education by Richard Zacks: Review
The Underminer by Mike Albo: Review
The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch: Review ; Quotes
Unholy Loves by Joyce Carol Oates: Quotes
The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch: Review
‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘The Unpasturable Fields’ by Lord Dunsany: Note
The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolley: Quotes
The Untouchable by John Banville: Quotes
Unusual Deaths: List
Unveiled by Cheryl Reed: Review
The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships by Temple Grandin: Quotes
An Utterly Impartial History of Britain by John O’Farrell: Quotes

V

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler: Review
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch: Review ; Quotes
Veronika Decides to Die by Paolo Coelho: Review
Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins: Review ; Quotes
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides: Review
‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
Voyage to the End of the Room by Tibor Fischer: Review ; Quotes

W

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson: Review
Walking on Glass by Iain Banks: Review
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks: Review
The Waste-Books by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Quotes
Watching the English by Kate Fox: Review ; Quotes
The Water Room by Christopher Fowler: Quotes
‘Wedding Preparations in the Country’ by Kafka: Quotes
The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde: Review
‘The Wendigo’ by Algernon Blackwood: Quotes
What’s Your Type of Career? by Donna Dunning: Review
Whiteout by Greg Rucka: Review
Who the Heck is Sylvia? by Joyce Porter: Quotes
‘William Wilson’ by E.A. Poe: Quotes
‘Wind and Fog’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami: Quotes
The Witches of Chiswick by Robert Rankin: Quotes
With a Woman’s Voice by Lucy Daniels: Review
With Charity Toward None by Florence King: Review
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon: Review
‘The Workman’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
‘The Worm and the Angel’ by Lord Dunsany: Quotes
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle: Review
The Writing Life edited by Marie Arana: Quotes

Y

Yellow by Janni Visman: Review
‘Yuko’ by Otsuichi: Review

about Carolyn Heilbrun by Vanessa Grigoriadia in New York

-01- Then there was Heilbrun’s most problematic notion, the one she believed was everyone’s moral right: a death of one’s own—suicide…

-02- Not many people came by the apartment [and she] announced late in life that she would no longer give any of her own [dinner parties] . Her clothes came from catalogues and dressmakers, and groceries from orders called in to the supermarkets.

-03- Heilbrun’s suicide was an act of will, an idea brought to life. It was something she chose, by herself, for herself.

-04- [Her friend Joan Ferrante:] We had agreed for a long time that [suicide] was the sensible way to face things.

And Heilbrun was nothing if not sensible: She made what she considered informed decisions, and seldom second-guessed herself. She disliked idle chit chat, so, at age 50, she took a Maoist approach to her social life, ordaining that her meetings with friends should he almost wholly restricted to one-on-one affairs.

-05- It is this courage to choose—to live life as you want, and to hell with everyone else, even those who love you—that both enriched Heilbrun’s life, and hastened her death. E.M. Forster writes, ‘It is difficult, after accepting six cups of tea, t throw the seventh in the face of your hostess,’ but Heilbrun made a life of, as she writes, ‘flinging the conventional tea.’

-06- Death, on the other hand, she invested with no meaning at all. She left up instructions for her memorial, or about what to do with her body: Her family knew only that she had once commented, after the death of the family cat, that she didn’t have any feelings on that topic. ‘You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care,’ she said.

-07- …there is a history of it among prominent modern women writers, from Woolf (rocks in pockets, walks into lake) to poet Anne Sexton (carbon-monoxide poisoning in garage) to Sylvia Plath (head in oven).

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) French poet most well-known for Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) and the first person to translate Edgar Allan Poe’s work into French.

An aesthete and dandy, he believed (and practised) in the pleasures of the senses. This led him to possibly contract syphilis and gonorrhea. Oh well.

Like Virginia Woolf, he believed art should capture the small, ephemeral moments of life. Unlike Woolf, he was of an impressively cynical mindset and loved him some irony. Though a cynic, he also believed people were fundamentally good. (A view he and I share. They may seem to be diametrically opposed, but, though the world seems harsh and awful, we also believe that it can be better–that man has the capacity to improve and to rise above.)

Similarly to holding seemingly contradictory worldviews, The Flowers of Evil is both grotesque and beautiful with several poems focusing on the putrefaction of the physical body after death whilst carrying on to wax lyrical on the beauty of life. This could be stomach-churning to the faint of disposition, but makes sense in that one can’t fully appreciate life if one isn’t intensely aware of death.

The juxtaposition of death and living life vigorously–and lending a poetic beauty to both–is echoed in Nine Inch Nails lyrics. Reznor’s words can be nauseating but simultaneously truthful and evocative and can express both disgust and a deep affection for a woman, much like Baudelaire. Both have also been reviled by the masses as being immoral and disgusting, but celebrated by those aware of the true nature of existence.

When initially published, Les Fleurs du Mal was receiving well amongst the literary set though several poems were removed prior to publication being deemed obscene (including one about lesbianism). However, most of his work was published after his death.

My favourite thing about Baudelaire is that, when acquainted with Poe’s stories, he felt Poe was expressing thoughts in his own mind that had not fully formed. That feeling of intellectual companionship is something readers most look for, I think. We read to find people of our own views and whims, but who more beautifully articulate those views and whims. We read to find friends without regard to nationality or age. And I’m glad to have found a friend in good old Baudey.

Reading Finished in September 2012

Comics/Graphic Novels
Gloomcookie (issues 3 – 15)
Fables (issue 1)
Death Note Black Edition Volume 3
Gay Comix (issue 5)

Short Fiction
Multiple Poe stories
Multiple Lord Dunsany stories
Black Fairy Tale by Otsuichi
‘The Wendigo’ by Algernon Blackwood

Long Fiction
Hell with the Lid Off Part One by Lee Adam Herold

Non-Fiction
The Goth Bible by Nancy Kilpatrick

Read But Not Finished

The Anatomy of Melancholy
Satan Speaks
‘The Three Impostors’ by Arthur Machen
Mythology Visual Reference

[This post is from a previous blog; original date: 31 January, 2008.]

They can make you pick up a book you’d normally not look at twice or repel your hand as surely as if it were on fire. The loved, the reviled, the dust wrapper. Dust jacket. Dust cover. Whatever. It’s a misnomer in the first place, as dust collects on the top of the book, not on the covers. But that’s not what this post is about.

I’ve recently been having a very interesting conversation about dust wrappers and the people who love them or hate them and someone posted a site about the history of the dust jacket. [The site no longer exists, unfortunately. It was: www.readingbooks.info/Dustjackets] My fav bit is this: “The scarcity of surviving jackets, particularly early examples, results from their purpose and the perceptions of the buying public. Dust jackets were a selling tool, designed to book promote and protect the book inside. Once the book had been purchased and taken home, book buyers were expected to dispose of them. And many did. Keeping the dusk jacket was the equivalent of keeping the boxes in which perfume bottles are supplied today.”

I like dust covers when they’re designed well but as soon as I take a book off the shelf to read it I get that thing naked. The dust cover gets in my way. As one person so aptly put: “They flip, flop, slip, slide, pop out when the book is opened, get stretched out of shape if the end flaps are used as space markers, they can be completely unmanageable.” Yes, my friend. Yes.

I do keep the cover and will later put it back on the book when I’m finished reading most of the time, but sometimes, the book itself is so beautiful–-cloth covered and embossed with the title and author on the spine–-that I don’t bother. If the cover is offensive enough (the third Dexter book by Jeff Lindsay, for example) the cover goes in the bin as soon as it gets through the door.

Some people brodart their dust wrappers like librarians… This makes some sense if the book is valuable, otherwise it’s a little anal retentive. And by “a little” I mean, “get a hobby. Really.”

Oh, wait, that is their hobby. Nevermind.

I’ve always loved the woman’s posture in the painting above, as I often find myself in that posture when reading.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present, Lezende Vrouwen . The site is in Dutch, but it’s not difficult to navigate around and look at all of the great paintings of women reading from the 15th century to the present.

Unfortunately, they don’t have my all-time favourite painting:

For more paintings of Reading Women see this page .

A friend read a novel I’d written about a person who isn’t naturally violent but also has no empathy and therefore makes the perfect killer; this person is recruited to work for a privately-funded organisation that removes certain people from the general populace. It’s philosophical black humour. My friend said she really liked it and it reminded her of something else she’d read–a comic called Poison Elves . She let me borrow Sanctuary , the fifth volume in the series, and, lo’ amighty, it’s very similar to my novel. The main character is an elf named Lusiphur and he’s brought into a secret organisation of assassins. There’s quite the black humour, but happily, the similarities end there. I say ‘happily’ because I don’t want to get sued by anyone for stealing a character or storyline.

It is nice to read a sort of parallel universe story to my novel since I usually worry that my world is too dark and frightening to appeal to people. [Then again the ball of sunshine known as Hubert Selby was popular so I'm not sure if being too dark is possible.] It’s also nice to be able to experience a world like mine that’s just a bit different–it’s as though the comic were written just for me. I’d also recommend this one to anyone who likes the Dexter books by Jeff Lindsay. Solid four stars.

When I decided to turn this blog into a repository for the lists of books I’d read, wanted to read, and the quotes from and reviews of those books, I started with taking the lists of books read (which I had kept sporadically) and fill in the blank times using journals since I usually mentioned what books I was reading.

Looking down my list of books read is like listening to songs I haven’t heard in ages–-some so bring back the time I read it that it’s like being there again, no matter the season or current affairs. It’s cold outside right now but I think about reading The Alienist and suddenly it’s hot outside and I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom–my leg’s fallen asleep because I don’t want to get up; I’m so engaged in the story.

Also, looking down the chronological list of books I’ve read is like looking at my life–-reading rubbish when I was too distracted to read anything else, seeing a title I took five months to finish because I was moving at the time, etc. I see several books of the same type or on the same subject and remember what led me to start down that path–whether it was doing research for a novel or because I’d been turned on to an author for the first time. Good times.

I’ve always been a proponent of keeping a list of books read, but now I have another reason for encouraging people to do so–it’s a journal of sorts. But rather than a journal of activities, it’s more about motivations, emotional states, and the joy of discovering new writers and books.

And there are few joys that compare with that.

[Note about the image: It's part of Thomas Jefferson's list of books when the Library of Congress was acquiring his library. More information here .]

“When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it–which comes to the same thing–is by writing in it.”

–Mortimer Adler