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

I'm ahead of myself, up to the end of September...
September 13th was the day Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel and their wives Nelly and Alma escaped the Nazis through the unoccupied port of Marseilles. In the same month, Walter Benjamin left it too late.

Still doing a page a day for the entire year, and loving the insights into books and reading and writing.

I'm ahead of myself, September 9th

Did you know that Ben Jonson was imprisoned without a hearing because he made fun of the Scots in Eastward Ho? I must read it, there are signs abroad that the Scots are taking themselves very seriously at the moment. It's the kilts, I think, that make it difficult for non-Scots to do the same...

Still recommend this ... a page every day, for the year, and I still look forward to seeing what literary connections are happening today

Well, well, I have something in common with Van Gogh - he was a keen reader, and he loved Zola as I do:)

Interested to see that on July 5 1814 Thomas Jefferson wrote scornfully about Plato's Republic. I think more people are reading Plato today than Jefferson!

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!