Bleakest house
I haven’t written about my book club’s slow read of Bleak House because, well, I haven’t known what to say about it. In my post on the end of War and Peace, I said that I’d read Bleak House twice before and it was very important to me at a defining time in my life…
And one had to live
We’re done War and Peace! We finished ages ago, actually — two whole months. It took me about that long to get over my disappointment with the ending. It wasn’t where all the characters ended up; my reading group predicted everyone’s final couplings and fates very accurately (almost like we are a bunch of narrative-obsessed…
Goals are meaningless
I set a reading goal every year. Mostly I do this because Goodreads prompts me to do it. For the past few years, I’ve set that goal at a just-out-of-reach-enough-to-feel-uncomfortable number, around 90 or 100. I’ve never made it to 100. I seem to naturally end up at around 85. Does it matter if I…
On Being Halfway: War and Peace and Reading in a Pandemic
In the fall of 2021, my friend told me about a new book called Tolstoy Together. It was a record of a group read of War and Peace, Tolstoy’s 1869 masterpiece. In the very early days of the pandemic, writer Yiyun Lee invited anyone who wished to join her in a slow read of War…
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