I made two miscalculations last month. First, my reading schedule included too many fat books and I never did get around to slipping the really big one in, and second, I made the mistake of assuming Carlyle’s French Revolution would be a pleasant educational break from all that confusing fiction.
I forgot: It’s all fiction!
Continue reading “Goodbye 2020”It’s here. Edited by Bradford Morrow, the 75th Issue of Conjunctions titled, Dispatches from Solitude.
Continue reading “Dispatches from Solitude”While plagues have historically fostered every kind of loss—of freedom, of livelihood, of hope, of life itself—the isolation of grim eras such as the one we are now experiencing can also provoke introspection, fresh curiosity, and, with luck and mettle, singular creativity. If necessity is the mother of invention, so can deprivation generate art that might not otherwise have come into being, the constraints of sequestration thus giving rise to many voices and visions.
Despite my apparent predilection for more hoary classics, big fat books, quirky metafiction, and overlooked international texts, I find great relief in traditional narratives with calm, easy narratives involving real people challenged by real experiences and real events .. even if real is assuredly fiction. I suspect that reading-for-pleasure is still a significant element in my psyche, periodically contending with my curiosity for more challenging forms of literature which admittedly may be fulfilling an academic rather than a personal need.
Here are three books I have recently read, each of which suggests a different approach to reading.
Continue reading “Three Approaches To Reading”
