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The Best of Tales From The Reading Room

Summary

Collected Essays from LitLove's website. Finally, the book of the blog.

If you are a fan of 'Tales from the Reading Room', then you probably love books like us. So it only seemed right that we should turn some of Litlove's best posts of the last 18 month into an artifact to treasure, re-read and share. In this exquisite soft bound edition you will find 140 pages containing 34 of Litlove's best essays on life, literature and how to make sense of both.

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£6.10 - Book shipped to UK £7.25 - Book shipped to EUR £8.10 - Book shipped to ROW

Introduction

I can’t remember a time when I would not have agreed with the well-known words of essayist and critic Logan P. Smith, ‘People say that life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.’ Reading means the chunky feel of a book in my hands, it means time spent in serene seclusion, and above all it means glorious immersion in the vivid world of the imagination. It was the pleasures of reading that eventually guided me into a career as a literary critic, but when illness resulted in a lengthy study leave from my university, I found I had plenty of time to read, but no one to share my thoughts and ideas with. I missed having students to talk at, missed the lively discussions about life and love and joy and suffering. And so, tentatively at first, I began a book blog. Within two months it had become the dominant obsession of my days and an object of intense infatuation. What blogging allowed me to do was to write about books with a flexibility that I had never previously enjoyed. Academic writing is a very restrained form of discourse, one in which the subjectivity of the reader is rigorously excluded. This is fine as far as it goes, but of course one never reads that way. Reading is about stitching ourselves into the story, living it as if it were our own, and carrying away in our hearts a fresh store of insight and enlightenment. It’s about feeling more alive because of reading, more in touch with our experience. Academics is no place for passion, but in blogging I could write about literature and life as they exist in the world; fiercely bound together, mutually informative, intertwined. What follows is a compilation of my favourite posts from the blog, in which reading is always the thing, but only because one day it might teach us how to love life.

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Contents

1. In A Word Tangle by LitLove
2. Becoming A Writer by LitLove
3. On Richar Russo's Straight Man by LitLove
4. Borges, Litlove And I by LitLove
5. My Significant Authors: Julian Barnes by LitLove
6. Political Correctness: Friend or Foe? by LitLove
7. The Great Gatsby by LitLove
8. My Husband in Books by LitLove
9. The Ugly Truth by LitLove
10. Love Letters by LitLove
11. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres by LitLove
12. Creativity, Freedom and Play by LitLove
13. On Heinrich von Kleist by LitLove
14. Whan Librarians Turn Bad by LitLove
15. Things I Wish Books Hadn't Taught Me by LitLove
16. My Thoughts on the Gender Debate by LitLove
17. On Virginia Woolf by LitLove
18. The Torture of Foreign Languages by LitLove
19. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth by LitLove
20. A Mini Guide to Surrealism by LitLove
21. The Rescue Fantasy by LitLove
22. On Childhood by LitLove
23. Coming To Writing by LitLove
24. On Jean Baudrillard by LitLove
25. Bringing Up A Boy by LitLove
26. Rules of Reading by LitLove
27. Arists in Love by LitLove
28. Send in the Clowns by LitLove
29. The Tango by LitLove
30. The Power of Words by LitLove
31. What is Postmodernism? by LitLove
32. Men in Love I: Blind Passion by LitLove
33. On Rilke by LitLove
34. My Reading of the Nativity by LitLove