Muriel Spark – Cannonball Read 17

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

August 11, 2025 by ElCicco Leave a Comment

Cbr17bingo School This short novel is considered Muriel Spark’s best work. Set in a girls’ school in Edinburgh in the 1930s, it tells the story of a group of school girls and their influential, charismatic teacher Miss Jean Brodie. “The Brodie Set,” as the girls and their teacher are known, attract envy and suspicion from both students and staff at Marcia Blaine school as Miss Brodie flouts convention and invites her young students into confidences that are deeply inappropriate. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie […]

Teacher’s Pets

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

June 13, 2025 by jeverett15 Leave a Comment

At an Edinburgh all-girls school in the 1930s, Miss Jean Brodie teaches her young students in her own way. Flaunting the restrictive attitudes of her headmistress and defying social conventions for women of the time, Miss Jean Brodie is a force to be reckoned with. But is she a force for good? Muriel Spark’s novel has been near the top of my TBR list for a long while, but I admit I had never looked into what it was about too closely. I heard that […]

Suspicion

Symposium: A Novel by Muriel Spark

November 26, 2023 by ElCicco Leave a Comment

There is something about writers from Scotland, rather like those from Scandinavia, that just brings along the darkness. Reading Muriel Spark’s short 1990 novel Symposium reminded me of a read from last year, Elspeth Barker’s 1991 novel O, Caledonia. Both novels feature old moneyed families fallen on hard times in Scotland, and both cast a gimlet eye on the intellectual, propertied class. Also, both are excellent, quick reads. Symposium is a murder mystery that happens while a dinner party is occurring. Sparks takes us in […]

Charming with Dark Undertones

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

August 8, 2021 by esmemoria 6 Comments

CBR Bingo – People. The cover of the edition I read has silhouettes of the main characters under a tree. Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a short but fantastic novel about a schoolteacher and a small group of girl students known as the Brodie set. Miss Brodie is an unconventional, independent teacher with definite ideas of how the students should behave and what they should think. She exhorts the girls to comport themselves with dignity while oversharing about her love life. […]

In June of 2016 my wife, Jen, and I took our fourteen-month-old daughter, Oona, to the Nantucket Film Festival.

The New One by Mike Birbiglia

My Vanishing Country by Bakari Sellers

Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter

Hey Rube by Hunter S Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Nickle Brickle'Bee by Sterling Nixon

Cold Storage by David Koepp

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The Mark of Zorro by Johnson McCulley

The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

November 28, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

The New One – 3/5 Stars This is the second Mike Birbiglia book I’ve read, after Sleepwalk with Me, and it’s good in the ways that comedians’ books are good and bad in the way that comedians’ books are bad (though this is a general issue with the form more than this specific book). Mike Birbiglia’s career is interesting in part because of the way he clearly got taken up by “Big Storytelling” around 2009 or so, and the opportunities to write movies that came […]

One day in my young youth at high summer, lolling with my lovely companions upon a haystack, I found a needle.

The Stories of Muriel Spark by Muriel Spark

April 9, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

The collected stories of the Scottish writer Muriel Spark, most well known for her slim novels like The Driver’s Seat, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Mandelbaum Gate, and The Girls of Slender Means. I have to admit, there hasn’t been a single Muriel Spark novel that I’ve absolutely loved. For whatever reason, her use of language feels refracted to me in the sense that I look at it and see it and read, but my brain can’t a hundred percent process what exactly is going on. […]

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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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