Reading for Pleasure? Wednesday: Arturo Pérez Reverte

I am told that La Reina del Sur is a good novel but I find it artificial and rather stressful so far. There is a movie of it which could be better, and there is a corrido of it by Los Tigres del Norte which is worse — at least if you watch the video [...]

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Mercè Rodoreda

Any time is a good time to read Mercè Rodoreda. The Nation’s review article on her is worth reading, too. I have never really studied Rodoreda’s life and I have not read all of her books. Having read the review, however, I am re-fascinated. At one point the writer says:
It’s curious that Rodoreda is so [...]

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Klaus Brandl

Communicative Language Teaching in Action explains a great deal about what is now happening. It is not required reading for me, but it is most illuminating and so it is a true pleasure.
Axé.

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Edgar Allan Poe

‘This old man,’ I said at length, ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a [...]

For August 29: The ‘I’ of the Storm

On August 27, 2005, I talked to all my New Orleans people, and on August 28 they came here. Some stayed; others went on to Houston and Austin after lunch.
Traffic was really heavy that morning. The people and the storm were inevitably coming, and I was concerned to see how long we might be [...]

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Åsa Larsson

In Spain, Swedish crime fiction is all the rage. I read Åsa Larsson’s first novel Sun Storm and it was fascinating, as are most things Nordic. Now I want to see the film and to read recent books as yet untranslated. I would like to find out about Åsa Larsson’s possible preacher father.
You, too, can [...]

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Asher Lev

…At the end of the novel, Lev creates his masterpiece. He paints his mother as crucified between himself, her son, the artist and his father, her husband, the activist. The entire novel has been about his own struggle, being torn between his love for his parents and community and his love and need for art. [...]

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday, Bastille Day Edition: John Locke

“Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them…with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and [...]

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: Isis the Scientist

A fabulous post on the limits and pitfalls of “civil discourse.” Via Historiann.
Axé.

For St. George’s Day: Friedrich Nietzche

From the Geneaology of Morals:
The “well-born” simply felt themselves the “happy”; they did not have to manufacture their happiness artificially through looking at their enemies, or in cases to talk and lie themselves into happiness (as is the custom with all resentful men); and similarly, complete men as they were, exuberant with strength, [...]