In the last post, I said I was taking a break from Barbara Pym to get through other books in my stack. Haha, JUST KIDDING. In truth, there was a bit of an emergency. Book Club is this Sunday, and I chose Excellent Women. The Chancellor has been borrowing my copy, and we both realized he would probably not be done in time for me to read it before Sunday. So…to the library I went and bypassed the other books on my nightstand. Excellent Women […]
Sexism and the home/workplace in Barbara Pym
Okay, I am about to take a Pym break to get through some other books in the stack, but I will leave you for now with A Glass of Blessings, which looks at some common themes and ideas that Pym has worked through in her canon. Wilmet Forsyth is a bored housewife. Her husband Rodney is a civil servant who is married to his work. They live with his mother Sybil, an attentive but independent companion. She becomes involved with her local parish and invests […]
Another delightful takedown of academia
Hey, look, another Barbara Pym review from me! I clearly went overboard two library trips ago. Or was it three? I don’t know. I have such a HUGE STACK that I need to get through that the books are starting to blur together. Gah. I really want to up my reading game, but now that the weather is so nice, everyone wants to get together. Oh, well. It’s very Pym-ish to be doing things with people. 🙂 This time, An Academic Question turns its focus […]
More Barbara Pym. More hijinks.
If you haven’t guessed, I’ve been going through a Barbara Pym phase these days. It’s been a lot of fun to read novels that are seemingly of “another time” and yet have some delicious biting commentary on human nature that is still relevant today. Plus, Pym has an incisive wit reminiscent of Jane Austen’s. Her novels are highly readable and very engrossing.This novel certainly does not stray from this successful formula. An Unsuitable Attachment follows a parish in urban London, where the poor Caribbean immigrants […]
Pregnancy and dissertations don’t go together.
I’ve read some of David Lodge’s literary criticism but never any of his novels. My undergrad advisor had recommended The British Museum Is Falling Down as a twentieth-century novel that is really funny. And truly, in my field, funny is not always so easy to find. I was more than happy to give it a shot, but excited to see that it’s also a novel about academia. The novel focuses on Adam Appleby, a doctoral student and a devout Catholic, who is afraid that his […]
Peter Rabbit goes to the fair. Chaos ensues.
After thoroughly exciting myself with The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter, I decided that it was time to read Emma Thompson’s companion novel. I did not realize that she’d written two other novels prior to The Spectacular Tale of Peter Rabbit. So, once I get done with this current library stack, I will have to read the other two novels. The Spectacular Tale is an adventure–or rather, misadventure–of young Peter and young Benjamin. They are sent off to go run an errand, but old Mrs. […]
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