About a year ago, I was reading Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945) and it was such a gush of words that it was almost intoxicating; I found myself ordering a copy of The Man Who Loved Children (an earlier novel, perhaps her best-known overseas, in which I’d stalled
This year I’m focusing on anthologies and stories in magazines. Partly because I have eleventy-billion issues of The New Yorker around here that I’ve only partially read; partly because I always say that I want to read more anthologies but then I choose other books instead (I’m reading two,
Y’all know that I love the library, but one of the aspects I love most is being able to sample, to see if there’s a match for my reading taste before I purchase. It’s an hour’s walk—there and back, in total—but I can plan to avoid the rain. (I
I grew up reading Enid Blyton, wondering what was ginger beer and desperately wanting some for my own “secret island” and other adventures. So it’s unsurprising that I understood the value Proust placed on the taste of a madeleine, decades before I tasted one myself, decades before I read
Seeing that some of my reading habits had shifted unexpectedly at the end of last year, I scribbled a note to peek mid-way this year, just to see how my ideas about my reading compared to my actual reading. The short version of my plans included reading from my
