Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

Ah ha! The first really interesting discovery: 26 June 1948 was the day that The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was published, its critique of conformity causing national dismay, on the same day that the Berlin Airlift began. I watched the short film of this story on You Tube, along with a beaut analysis of it from Six Minute Scholar!

Here we are celebrating the winter solstice in Australia and this author has no idea that the southern hemisphere exists. Hello, Nissley, it's not summer everywhere you know!

Got to meet Tom in University Place last week--great guy.

Yay, a Canadian author (Farley Mowat), an unedifying snippet about Ezra Pound's admiration for Hitler and Proust's brief stint as a librarian's assistant

Hmmpf, I did not expect to find 50 Shades in a book like this.

This would be a much more interesting book if it had a global perspective, I'm starting to get sick of second-order US authors taking up page space at the expense of great authors from around the world. Apart from a few classics, Nissley seems not to know any European authors at all...

Ha, no surprises for me in what this author has to say about the Canterbury Tales, because I've just finished reading the whole thing - in Middle English - and been to a brilliant lecture about it, and I already knew about the astronomical allusions, so there!

As the author of occasionally heretical reviews, I am pleased to see that Charlotte Bronte was brave enough to say that she didn't care for Jane Austen. I don't agree with her opinion, but I like the courage she had in expressing it. (April 12)

April 4th dates the end of Zola's friendship with Cezanne, when Cezanne sent 'a chilly note' in receipt of Zola's new novel L'Oeuvre in which an artist descends into madness and failure...

March 24th in 1857 was when Tolstoy witnessed an execution by guillotine, and was disgusted by it. I don't need to witness an execution to know that all forms of capital punishment disgust me.

Did you know that Pablo Picasso wrote a play? It was called Desire Caught by the Tail...