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I have enjoyed the discussion and think some excellent points have been made. Two (at least) different issues are being addressed. First, the canon of what is to be read/taught in school. It has been slowly changing, as one would expect. More adding than subtracting, I hope. Second...

If reading is simply decoding letters of the alphabet back into the speech that those letters record, then the cereal box is serviceable if a bit dull. With Harry Potter you also get characters and a narrative, something that Harry Potter has in common with the Iliad and Shakespeare. Why do...

I remember.... My mother's home-made peach ice cream. She had a real ice cream freezer, the kind where you add salt and ice and turn the crank. Usually she made vanilla but once, during peach season, she made it with fresh peaches.

The Times article was especially looking at books given or assigned to teen agers. This is an age where you hope you are introducing readers to serious literature. If a book seems totally unrelated to their lives and concerns - not relevant, in other words - you may have great difficulty getting...

"Guys" only?

There used to be shelves of book-rental books in the back of drug or variety stores. They stocked mostly best sellers in hard cover and the feels were modest. I haven't seen them for years. I suspect they were done in by mass market paperbacks.

And yet.... We've all been pushed by school requirements to read books we weren't ready for or which were totally out of tune with whatever melody our life was playing at that time. Or we had the juice sucked out the experience by dry analysis. That may not be a good metaphor. Can dry...

My all-time-favorite biography is The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell was a 19th century novelist who was almost as popular as Dickens. (She still reads well, but she was no Dickens.) Anyway, after Bronte published Jane Eyre, she and Gaskell became friends and visited...

I am straight but I think all of us have a little gay in us somewhere. I recommend The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin.

I'll overlook your non-literary, non-literate language and speak to the question. Do you mean Elizabeth Peters and the Emerson-Peabody series with the Egyptian archaeologists? If you do, you have it wrong. Both Emerson (male) and son Ramses are quite as intelligent, daring and resourceful as...

Any writer who doesn't die before 50 eventually becomes a writer over 50. Is this list limited to those who continue to write after 50? As a forum member over 50, I am sensitive to the concept that the brain shuts down at that time. In some ways the brain improves - all that experience may even...

I recommend The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. Using the science fiction genre, LeGuin gives us a brilliant picture of what it means to be male or female by depicting a society in which the members switch roles. Each person is both sexes or either sex, alternately. Sounds sexy, but...

You find plenty of "romance" in classic fiction because it is one of the staples of human life (romance, courtship, marriage, sex). But what does the author do with romance? He or she can use it to show the danger of illusion (Middlemarch) or the plight of the girl who has no possibilities in...

The Masseur book is set in Trinidad and is a gently satiric look at an exile community. No view of India at all. Naipaul can actually be quite harsh. I find his books set in Africa to be overdone, but he is an equal opportunity critic: hard on Indians, Africans, Europeans.

I have read quite a bit of Naipaul, although not this particular book. Naipaul is of Indian descent but grew up in Trinidad, not India, so when he first visited that country he had an outsider's point of view. This has not always been appreciated by the Indians. Over the years and several...

There are used books and then there are used books. Perhaps, as with people, the smell of a used book is related to its past life. A book which has sheltered in a dignified private library or on the shelf of a loving family surely smells different from one that was dumped for years in a basement...

I also agree. The best memoirs are stories based on the writer's memories. I may not remember word-for-word what my mother said, but I can remember how she talked, her usual language, our interactions, what meaning I took from it. From this I make my account, my memoir. But it would be unfair to...

Me too. I've been in Amherst several times, but never made the tour. Still, even seeing the house from outside gives you a idea of the family's status. I also got a virtual tour of the house by reading Emily Dickinson Is Dead by Jane Langdon (Langden?), a mystery set in Amherst and involving a...

I have read several of her books, and all with pleasure. There was one about single women of a certain age which was sweet, but rather sad. Sorry, but I forget the title. While reading, one thinks "how civilized, how estimable" but then, when the book is done, one realizes that these women were...

I belong to two book groups. One reads classics and the other one a variety of books, many newer. The classics groups reads longer works, like Middlemarch and Bleak House, but we need to take several sessions per book. The other group has recently enjoyed such books as The Curious...