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Distraction & Diversion: Chris Hayes’ “The Sirens’ Call” – Thornfield Hall
At the coffeehouse I asked my friend if her bookstore carried a new small-press book. She said it did not, but she would order it. "What's the title again?" "I've got a pen and paper here." "Oh, I've got my phone." I don't mean to be sanctimonious, but I was flabbergasted. Who would prefer typing…
Post-Party Reading: Nancy Mitford’s “Don’t Tell Alfred” – Thornfield Hall
I'm so exhausted by my birthday party that that I can hardly get off the couch. Pop-up cards! A picnic! Hours of conversation! And so I'm sitting around reading Nancy Mitford. No one is wittier than Nancy Mitford, and her last novel, Don't Tell Alfred (1960), is her best and funniest. Fanny, the narrator of…
“Outrageous,” the Britbox Show about the Mitfords – Thornfield Hall
Outrageous, the new TV show about the Mitfords. If you are an out-of-control Mitford fan, that is, if you have read alll of Nancy's novels and biographies, and Jessica's hilarious autobiography and radical journalism, you must sit down with a pot of tea and prepare to watch Outrageous. Captain Nemo told me about Outrageous, the…
What I’m Reading: “Isola, “The AI Con,” and “Universality” (Final Version) – Thornfield Hall
I have been reading three terrific new books. They are not behemoths – two of them are very short – and I finished Allegra Goodman’s novel today. Allegra Goodman’s breathtaking new novel, Isola, is based on historical incidents. The prose is spare and elegant, the plot rapid-fire, and the contrast of the narrator’s wealthy childhood with her exile…
The Death of Book Reviews – Again! – Thornfield Hall
Who predicted the death of book reviews? Perhaps it began in the 1990s, when book pages depended on advertising and lost space for reviews. Regular reviewers sought new gigs after reviews were turned over to reporters. The obituary writers wrote great mystery reviews but… At our house, we have alway read book reviews. We love The…
Dystopian Denial: Will There Be Another Autumn? – Thornfield Hall
One of these days crying may be forbidden. Good girls don't cry. Survival will depend on the politics of water. I used to cry a lot when I was very young. Red, swollen eyes the next day. Calling in sick, because who can go to work looking like that? But I'm in a different phase…
The Mysteries of Modern Technology – Thornfield Hall
One day in the 1990s a free AOL disc arrived in the mail. I did not have the faintest idea what it was. I did not understand what "online" and "world wide web" meant, either. Several friends urged me to try it. And suddenly I was part of the AOL community. Lo and behold! bibliophiles wrote…
The Birthday Card: What If It Doesn’t Have the Right Number? – Thornfield Hall
This woman does not look as if she has lost her hormones yet! Mr. Nemo and I were looking at birthday cards. Looking, looking, looking... and we couldn't find the right number. Happy 30th Birthday! Done that. Happy 40th Birthday! I admit to that. But where do all the numbers go? Are we like Jack…
The Memoirs of a Courtesan: Daniel Defoe’s “Roxana” (Final Version) – Thornfield Hall
I came late to Daniel Defoe. I did not read A Journal of the Plague Year during our Plague. But this week I raced through Roxana, Defoe’s last novel, published in 1724, the rowdy, rollicking autobiography of Roxana, a-deserted-wife-turned-courtesan who delights in luxury but repents her sins. In fact, she is looking back in middle age at her life, saddened by…
Arachne and Me – Thornfield Hall
This summer I find myself identifying with Arachne. I have been rereading Metamorphoses, Ovid's brilliant epic poem, a collection of Greek myths linked by the theme of metamorphosis. Now that we're living in environmental hell, I turn to playful Ovid. I am enchanted by the twists and turns and loopy cleverness of his Latin hexameters. The…
Summer Reading: The “Deucalion and Pyrrha” Version – Thornfield Hall
Deucalion and Pyrhha (Rubens) I'm in the mood for what I'm calling the "Deucalion and Pyrrha" reading list. The weather is inclement all over. There has been a drought here for two years. And suddenly it rains and storms every night. Now there is flooding. I feel like Pyrrha in a feminist retelling of Ovid's…
Summer Reading: Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Written on the Dark” – Thornfield Hall
"Joy. Safety. They can be present for us, more often are not." -- Written on the Dark, by Guy Gavriel Kay In Guy Gavriel Kay's brilliant, beautifully-written new novel, Written on the Dark, he deftly infuses the narrative with bits of verse and philosophy. The book is part literary fantasy, part historical novel, set in…
Lost in a Classic: Balzac’s “Eugénie Grandet” – Thornfield Hall
Years ago in London I purchased a Vintage classics edition of Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, with a charming introduction by Rose Tremain. Published in the Vintage Classics Orange Inheritance series, it was one of six books chosen by winners of the Orange Prize (now The Women's Prize). This edition has the 19th-century translation by…
Booker Prize Longlist 2025: Katie Kitamura’s “Audition” – Thornfield Hall
"I had given in to his story... because of his persuasiveness - persuasion, which is only one step away from coercion." - Audition, by Katie Kitamura I am not suggesting that Katie Kitamura's glittering novel is a retelling of Austen's Persuasion. Both titles have three syllables, and that's the extent of it, on the surface.…
Is Contemporary Fiction Too New York-ish? – Thornfield Hall
My favorite new novel of the years is set in Maine! I have this feeling... This feeling that New York has sucked me in.,, This feeling that the new books I read are too "New York-ish." That's because New York is exhausting. We love the art museums, the operas, and the theater, but... it's bewildering. …
Balzac’s “Letters of Two Brides” and/or “The Memoirs of Two Wives” – Thornfield Hall
This post is a "rerun" of my review of Balzac's Letters of Two Brides, a charming, if slight, epistolary novel, translated by R. S. Scott in 1898. I recently read the new translation, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives (NYRB Classics),. The "review" below applies ot both versions. An 1898 copy of Balzac’s " Letters…
The Booker Prize Longlist 2025 – Thornfield Hall
Today the Booker Prize longlist was announced. I am familiar only with a few of the authors, which makes it all the more interesting. Good news: many are already available in the U.S. The rest are on order. Here is the Longlist 2025: Love Forms by Claire Adam The Link by Tash Aw Universality by Natasha Brown…
The Aftershocks of Crime: “The Brittle Age,” by Donatella Di Pietrantonio – Thornfield Hall
We live in a violent, terrifying world. Every time I read the news, there is a new report of a mass shooting. Here's the latest: "Five people are dead including the gunman after a shooting at 345 Park Ave., a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, on Monday evening..." (The Washington Post) Homicide is a daily occurrence in…
A Buoyant Comedy and an Eerie Dystopian Novel: “She Stoops to Conquer” and “The Memory Police” – Thornfield Hall
Until the millennium, I read only one book at a time. I would finish Philip Roth's American Pastoral before pouncing on my beloved Jane Austen's Persusion. Now it's Liberty Hall here; I have several books going at once. After too much screen time, I fall on my books like a graduate student with 1,000 pages to…
The State University Saved My Life – Thornfield Hall
My college education had a profound effect on me. Hilariously, I not only read voraciously for my classes, but I also read books on the syllabuses for other classes. Today Mr. Nemo and I were discussing the fascinating syllabus for a DeFoe to Austen class. I dropped out of the class because the professor was…
Lost in the Forest with Natty Bumpo – Thornfield Hall
"Where is Natty Bumpo?" one of us asked at one point. Of course you've never heard of Natty Bumpo, also known as Hawkeye. No one reads James Fennimore Cooper's dense historical novels anymore. In Cooper's alleged masterpiece, The Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumpo knows woodcraft. He is a white man raised by Indigenous people. …
Booker Prize Fever – Thornfield Hall
The Booker Prize judges: I know two of them, Roddy Doyle (far left) and Sarah Jessica Parker (far right). During a bitterly cold February, I was excited by the Booker International Prize longlist. In muddy March, it was the The Women's Prize longlist. In July I'm usually excited about the Booker Prize longlist, but I…
The Art of Sad Satire: Marrying Your Chatbot – Thornfield Hall
This summer I am committed to comedy. Evelyn Waugh? Check. Nancy Mitford? Check. Cynthia Heimel? Check. Peter DeVries? Of course. I am dedicated to Thalia, the muse of comedy. I make daily libations to laughter. But sometimes the twenty-first century is not at all funny. Did you know that a man in Idaho has married…
Oliver Goldsmith’s Gentle Comedy, “The Vicar of Wakefield” – Thornfield Hall
I’m in the mood for gentle comedy. Not Netflix comedy, but the literary kind. I’ve been frazzled because I had a computer “emergency,” a broken keyboard with sticky a’s, v’s, b’s, d’s, and x-es. As for my 11-year-old tablet, it has lost its little electrronic mind. It is, however, an excellent kitchen timer. And so…
The Iambic Knit/Purl of Sonnets: Carol Shields’ “Segue” – Thornfield Hall
I’m always good for 500 words. Maybe 900. OK, I’m a babbler, I’m a show-off, I’m a Can-I-Post-Every-Night person. I genuinely admire Carol Shields, but I couldn’t write one meaningful sentence last night. This morning I exorcised my demons by deleting my post on The Box Garden. I want briefly to write about another of…
Carol Shields’ Autograph: Where’s My Copy of “Larry’s Party”? – Thornfield Hall
Somewhere in a box I have an autographed copy of Carol Shields's novel, Larry's Party. At least I think it's in a box. I've searched the S shelves, and it is not with Shields's other books. That's the problem with moving: you never get around to unpacking all the boxes. The Guardian publishes a Q&A interview…
“Streamers Waving”: A Modernist Spinster’s Tale by C. H. B. Kitchin – Thornfield Hall
Reading C. H. B. Kitchin (1895-1967), a neglected 20th-century English writer, is one of the rewards of literary wanderings online and off-. Kitchin wrote brilliant, weird literary novels as well as cozy mysteries. His friend, the writer L. P. Hartley, lauded his work, but the critics were less enthusiastic, often damning him with faint praise.…
Spinning Fans: More Paperback Series – Thornfield Hall
During a hot, humid, quasi-tropical summer, when three fans spun in our apartment, and it was too hot to go outside, I drank iced tea and contemplated my collection of paperbacks. Then I decided whimsically to arrange them by cover and publisher. We won't talk about Penguins. We all know about them. But one of the…
What Class Are You? The Genealogy Crisis – Thornfield Hall
UNITED STATES - CIRCA 1950s: Woman writing letter. On a sunny, cold Friday in autumn when I coughed nonstop because I had bronchitis, I waited for the mail, expecting a note from a posh writing professor who kindly sent postcards to his former students, and insisted that it was no trouble to read our manuscripts.…
A Quiet, Neglected Classic: Donald Hall’s “The Ideal Bakery” – Thornfield Hall
Little-known fact: The award-winning poet Donald Hall, the 14th Poet Laureate of the U.S., wrote an elegiac collection of short stories, The Ideal Bakery, published in paperback in 1988. Like the Vintage Contemporary series, the Perennial Library paperbacks had a distinctive design and published prestigious writers. Perhaps Perennial writers were less hip, but no less…
Cynthia Heimel, the Wittiest Humorist You’ve Never Heard of – Thornfield Hall
"Never try to establish a successful flirtation when your hair is a mess." - Cynthia Heimel In the late 1980s I found a copy of Cynthia Heimel's Sex Tips for Girls at my favorite bookstore. I laughed out loud as I read the opening lines: "These are the times that try a girl's soul. We…
How Liberal Are We? The “Anti-Mass” Culture – Thornfield Hall
"How liberal are we?" I wondered on the bus as I read Anti-Mass, a how-to guide to organizing collectives published in underground newspapers in the 1970s. The attack on wicked mass culture made me realize how much I enjoyed mass culture. I wanted to be bourgeois, to live in a nice house, preferably in the…
Free Reading: The Pros and Cons of the TBR – Thornfield Hall
Someone's TBR! I do not have a TBR (To Be Read list). Of course I talk about it, because all bloggers do, but I don’t have a list. I walk around my bookcases, which are a bit like a TBR, and choose a book. It’s what I call free reading. Yet the TBR fascinates me. …
When the Pages Crumble: Thomas Hardy’s “Selected Poems” – Thornfield Hall
I was reading Thomas Hardy’s Selected Poems when a page began to crumble. It flew out of the book like an Origami bird. I felt like a haunted character in a ghost story. What was I reading that Thomas Hardy came down from the sky and took away the page? Do you suppose Hardy manifested…
Trollope’s Portrait of a Middle-Aged Woman: Lady Carbury, Hustler & Writer – Thornfield Hall
I often forget about Anthony Trollope. It is not that he is a bad writer, and it is not that I do not love his work, but simply because he does not have a distinctive Victorian voice. Think of Dickens with his rhetorical repetitions and figures of speech; Charlotte Bronte with her gloomy imagery and…
On Vacation with Evelyn Waugh – Thornfield Hall
Vacation reading I am treating myself to 20th-century novels after my marathon of Greek tragedy last spring. I am still haunted by Medea's strikingly feminist quote, “I would rather stand in front of the shield three times than give birth once.” But it foreshadows the horror ahead. And so I am relaxing with Evelyn Waugh’s…
Why We Loved the 1980s – Thornfield Hall
“You must be joking. You liked the ‘80s?” When I say I loved the '80s, people assume I’m thinking about Ronald Reagan (our first actor president), Nicaragua, punk rock, Pac-man, and yuppiebacks. I ignored politics and "pop" but I was a fan of the yuppieback. And if you don’t know what yuppiebacks are, you missed…
Raised on 19th-Century Literature – Thornfield Hall
Esther in Bleak House My fried Hen and I left our jobs at the same time. We didn’t dislike the work, and no doubt would have become Ms. Chips if we’d stayed, but you have no idea how exhausted we were, how little we liked the administration, and how bored we were by James Hilton’s…
The Way We Live Now – Thornfield Hall
Last week we reorganized our books. We have over 1,000 books, distributed in bookcases throughout the house. Most of them are in alphabetical order, but we now have a Jane Austen section, a Bronte section, a Conrad section, and a Dickens section. Most of these books have introductions, but not all have footnotes. (That’s why…
Dusty Books: Revising One’s TBR List – Thornfield Hall
What do you do when the TBR shelf is dusty? Do you casually apply a fluffy duster, or do you use Goo Gone and a microfiber cloth? After researching the cleaning of books, I began my late Spring Cleaning. First, I took all the books off the shelves. The living room was soon carpeted with…