Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty
My local book group discussed this last month. I was the only one who enjoyed it. I felt I had to justify my position but found it difficult to explain why I liked it. It wasn’t nostalgia (the iconic[…]

Brazzaville Beach is the William Boyd book I have most wanted to read since drifting into his work. Moreover it is the book most other people have wanted me to read. So they at least will be pleased to hear that I loved it. What concerns me is why th[…]

Derrida watch
Reading obituaries; comment pieces; jokey, dismissive jibes; personal tributes; and public commemorations: it’s still clear that pretty much no-one knows what to say about JD. About JD the man there’s a consensus, from those[…]

PORN STUDIES
Linda Williams, ed.
I never took any courses from Linda Williams while she taught at UCI, but this is no surprise — I was in grad school for English lit while she was over in film studies, and though there can be and is some crosso[…]

I DON’T beLIEVE IT!!
i got into Eyes, Lies & Illusions for free, by pretending to be r.sinker not m.sinker and thus in the education&outreach racket. This wz a good thing, cz it’s a bit lame for ‘9, sadly. Werner Nekes&#8[…]

Hidden secrets of nursery rhymes: lit crit equivalent of “The Magic Roundabout is all about drugs”, surely? And why is the book title a Smiths reference?[…]

BLOCK BLOG
2: Time To Murder And Create
How I Got It: Borders Charring Cross Road, which happened to be the first place I looked. After the difficulty of finding number one, I though this might be the case here. The only problem was its top shelf pos[…]

SUPERMAN IS DEAD
So said the cover of the Evening Standard yesterday. Ho hum, I said. Its not anything we haven’t seen before. He’ll be back in a couple of months.[…]

Five Things About Michael Chabon’s
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY
1: Clay doesn’t have any amazing adventures
Okay, he maybe has the amazing adventure that many of us have, living in a big city, doing work you like, doing wor[…]

Bernardo Belloto
Slaughterhouse Five is a book I read every couple of years. It is strange and horribly beautiful and I’m not sure I understand it all. More civilians died in Dresden than in both nuclear attacks on Japan combined. I don’t[…]