tiny_bookbot – Page 13 – Cannonball Read 17

A kinder book for a harder time

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

May 30, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 1 Comment

If I had known quarantine was coming, I would have made some different choices. For one, I would not have ordered Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light as my spring break read, since my focus would be far too fractured to get myself back into that Thomas Cromwell and the Tudors mindset. For another, I would not have assigned Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio to my intro students as our major readings for the back half of the semester. I went into lockdown and immediately recorded ten lectures […]

“Guys, Auden is my man”: it’s hard not to love W. H. Auden

Selected Poems by W. H. Auden

February 24, 2020 by tiny_bookbot Leave a Comment

I’m teaching a course on twentieth century British poetry, and we’re whipping through six poets in about fifteen weeks. My students appreciated T. S. Eliot, and enjoyed Robert Graves, but we are halfway through W. H. Auden, and he has enthralled them, hitting them square in their hearts with brutally accurate yearning and empathy. We’ve taken a thematic approach in working through the Selected Poems: quotidian life, war & politics, and most recently: the love poems. (We’ll hit the transcendence of art & religion, and then touch […]

Ciaran Carson’s Last Words: Love, all love

Still Life by Ciaran Carson

February 18, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 1 Comment

I love Ciaran Carson’s work. I have loved it since my junior year of undergrad, when I was studying abroad in Scotland and took a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature. We read The Ballad of the HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems, and something in Carson’s depictions of his beloved, troubled city hooked itself deep inside me. I have never forgotten the closing lines of his poem “Smithfield Market”: Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. But as the charred […]

Signs, and A Severe Mercy, must be read with caution

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

February 11, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 5 Comments

How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours? To be honest, Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy was a book I had avoided for a long time. There’s a few reasons, though first and foremost is the C. S. Lewis connection: almost ever edition of the […]

The broken images of Robert Graves

Selected Poems by Robert Graves

February 1, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 2 Comments

With 1917 potentially poised for success at the Oscars, it feels like a good moment to look at the work of a WWI poet, namely that of Robert Graves. Now, I didn’t read his Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, edited by Northern Irish poet Michael Longley) because of the film. If anything, it’s the other way around: I saw 1917 because I am teaching Graves’s poetry this semester to an upper-level class of English majors, and I was curious as to how well the film supplemented the poetry of […]

Agatha Christie’s ugly, beautiful, unimportant, and interesting truths

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

January 7, 2020 by tiny_bookbot 2 Comments

While I’ve read quite a number of detective novels and murder mysteries, I realized in the past year that the work of the “Queens of Crime” (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh) was a significant gap in my knowledge, with the exception of Dorothy Sayers–even though I’ve watched almost every available episode of David Suchet’s Poirot productions. (Those adaptations were–and I mean this as warm praise–just about the only way I fell asleep every night when I was on the academic job […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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