Here are some of my favorite posts from over the years–the ones I’m most proud of, or am most glad I wrote, whether for the satisfaction of the posts themselves or for the stimulation of the conversations they prompted.
On Books
Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72
Is Cormac McCarthy a Terrible Writer?
What Price Genius? Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
“They Were, Themselves, Specific”: Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost
“A Life Entirely Through Objects”: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
Am I Making Excuses for Gaudy Night?
“On Some Book My Name Will Be Written”: Dorothy Dunnett, King Hereafter
‘A Tincture of Grandness in Simplicity’: T. H. White’s The Once and Future King
“The Light of the World”: Nicola Griffith, Hild
“She is in love with life”: Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir
Confessions of a (Former) Non-Romance Reader; or, Everything I Know about Romance Novels I Learned on Twitter
“Women Catch Courage”: Carolyn Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time
On Reading Madame Bovary (I, II)
“Spill a Little Blood”: Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
Guilty as Charged: Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Novel Readings? James Wood, How Fiction Works
“The Story of an Eye” Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Leaving Brooklyn
Rebecca Mead, “George Eliot and Me”
On Academia
Disciplining English: Brian McCrea, Addison and Steele are Dead
Should Graduate Students Blog?
Blogging: Accept No Substitutes!
Standing in Chartres Cathedral Unmoved
Mark Bauerlein’s “The Research Bust”
Blogging and Intellectual Curiosity / Intellectual Curiosity: True Confessions Edition
Novel Readings 