LeliaApr 191 minPenelope Fitzgerald & the Exponentially PossibleBarbara Pym wasn’t a Penelope Fitzgerald fan. In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Pym writes, “I read Penelope Fitzgerld’s The Book Shop,...
LeliaMar 192 minTrying and Losing in Fitzgerald's The BookshopPenelope Fitzgerald writes such quietly brutal books. Florence Green with her naivete and kindness says toward the end of The Bookshop,...
LeliaMar 144 minUranian Freedom & Vita Sackville-WestEarly in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...
LeliaFeb 284 minBernardine Evaristo, Elaine Dundy, Patti Smith & ResilienceThere’s a great passage in Manifesto: On Never Giving Up where Bernardine Evaristo declares “In spite of what my father endured, he never...
LeliaFeb 24 minGood Behavior + Beauty NormsI finished Good Behavior which I read without great relish. I mostly cringed and held my breath. Molly Keane is merciless in presenting...
LeliaJan 247 min"Nightbitch" & Wildness: A Descent to SoulNightbitch has created a tangled skein of ideas in my head and I’m not sure I’ll unravel it. You know how Austin Kleon does mind maps? I...
LeliaJan 163 minEudora Welty, Peter Schjeldahl + Bill PlotkinIn The Optimist’s Daughter, the dark forces in the novel are Fay and her family, people “who never know the meaning of what has happened...
LeliaJan 1110 minJane Austen, Joan Didion & Self-respectDon’t you think Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel ever? It’s by far my favorite. That’s kind of a joke because most characters in...
LeliaJan 24 minMy Best-of Book List for 2021I like year-end best-of lists. Reading others’ lists is a fun way to learn about things I’ve missed. And thinking about my own best-of...
LeliaDec 24, 20213 minAnne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell HallRereading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I caved in and let myself skip Helen’s painful awakening to her husband’s true character. At first...