Bookworm Room

Tweet I was a Jane Austen fan long before it became trendy to be a Jane Austen fan. I’ve read Pride & Prejudice at least 20 times, and read all the other books at least 5 or 6 times (except for Northanger Abbey, which I’ve just never liked very much). I’m not quite sure why [...]

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Tweet I’ve always been a big fan of those few (two, actually) Horatio Alger stories I could get my hands on — Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy. They’re incredibly stilted novels, filled with heavy-handed moral messages, but they still have a wonderful innocent charm, a beautiful sense of a time long gone, and [...]

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Tweet The award for best opening sentence definitely goes to Myles Kantor, writing about Günther Grass (novelist and Nazi), who opens his article with this: The line between moralist and schmuck is very thin. I didn’t find the rest of the article quite as good, but it’s interesting, and worth reading just as a sign [...]

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Tweet Since I have a sometimes embarrassing fondness for romance novels (Mr. Bookworm teases me a lot), I’ve written about romance novels before (once about British chick-lit, which I think is demeaning to women; and once about the conservative morals underpinning American romances). I was therefore intrigued when AP did a little story about the [...]

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Tweet Laer has a rather horrifying exposé about a hot book series called Gossip Girls. You should read his post and, if you have young girls in your house, you might want to keep a weather eye on their bookshelf, backpack and library bag. This stuff is trashy by any standards, and it’s being marketed [...]

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