The subtitle of The Power of Habit is Why We Do What We do in Life and Business. Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter, writes about the science of habit formation and recounts wonderful stories of personal lives, businesses and social movements that illustrate the importance of understanding how habits are formed and changed. He describes a habit this way: we encounter a...
In Reading Matters‘ top ten novels for 2011, Leaving Ardglass is not to be found in the library at UVa, but I was able to get it on the kindle. Through the lives of two brothers, it tells the story of changes in Ireland from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, beginning with times when migration to America and England was the key to getting out of poverty, to boom times in Ireland. The...
The subtitle of Elaine Pagels' book Revelations is Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation. She is a professor of religion at Princeton, best known for her books about the Gnostic Gospels, a trove of materials hidden more than 1500 years ago in an earthenware jar in Nag Hammadi in Egypt, discovered in 1945. The book of Revelation, that bombastic last book in the New...
The narrator tells the story of his voyage as an 11 year old from Ceylon to London in 1954, sent on his own to his mother who had been in London for some years. The character is named Michael, and the author tells us at the end that he did make this trip on his own at that time, and that otherwise the book is fiction. The cat's table is the least desirable one in the dining...
I had low expectations for this police procedural, but found myself listening with growing enthusiasm. It follows many of the usual dictates for novels of this type. The detective is competent, unlike many of his fellows, is trying to quit his bad habits, and has alienated his wife. In this case Joe Cashin is trying to quit smoking, is recovering from a terrible gunshot wound...
It's taken me some time to finish this slim book as I read it in French. And along the way, I have tried to commit to memory the words I did not know. It was actually an ideal book for a pathetic student of French like me, as the existential writer (a label Camus rejected) recounts so much of everyday matters that even I could read much of it. As long as you know words...
P.D. James playing Jane Austen….a better walking companion I cannot imagine. P.D. James imagines the life of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth (of Pride and Prejudice) after 6 years of marriage; they have two perfect sons, her beloved father comes to visit regularly, Jane and Bingley live nearby and come to visit often, and the housekeeper loves Elizabeth. Into this idyllic world comes a murder in...
Trilogy by Henry Handel Richardson, pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, an Australian who lived from 1870 to 1946. The first book is Australia Felix, the second, The Way Home, and finally, Ultima Thule. Thanks to Tony, guest writing for Whispering Gums. At UVa, not Jeff-Madison. Catherine the Great. Robert K. Massie. In Clemons. ...
Ned Kelly is a heroic figure for Australians. He was not a founding father, not a great leader of the country, not a great inventor or thinker. He was a bushranger, that is, an outlaw, in the 1870s. Peter Carey wanted to explore what it is about Australians that makes them find Kelly a heroic figure. Of course there was also a long letter that Kelly wrote to defend himself in 1879 reproduced...
Last Sunday the New York Times Book Review had a piece about Elizabeth Taylor, the British author, which caught my interest as I had seen her name mentioned in a literary blog recently. The New York Review of Books has reissued two of her books, Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek. Angel, born in 1885, is the daughter of a widow who keeps a shop in a poor neighborhood. ...