*Full Circle
When I was five, my family moved to a new neighbourhood. It was May 1st and I was in kindergarten, starting at a new school, where the 12 year olds looked to me about the same size as the teachers, and I wasn’t sure which was which in the schoolyard. My stuffed animals and paints were left behind in the old house and I was bereft. However, while walking on my new street (alone, as kids did in those days, even at five and a half), I saw a kid standing in her front yard. She had short dark hair, dark eyes and tanned skin and I wasn’t sure if she was a boy or a girl, so I asked her. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, albeit with disruptions and de

*Barbara Kingsolver
And another writer taking a good long time to write a good book: nine years between Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and The Lacuna. About research, she says: The research was daunting: It felt, in the beginning, that I was undertaking to move a mountain with a teaspoon…[T]he lion’s share of the work happened here i

*Shakespeare and Gender
A fashion of black teeth and ruffled collars, courtesy of the invention of starch imported from France, which led the upper classes to abhor the damp (wilted ruffles). This is the backdrop of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare. In a fun and fast book, he separates fact from myth about the playwright while providing a fascinating look at the gender bending, ever dynamic, new play a day, fevered atmosphere of late Elizabethan London. (Full review here.) Posted in Literature Tagged: Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

*Rejection Letter
Sketch of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra, perhaps after she received this letter Dear Miss Austen, Thank you for your submission, recommended to me by our mutual friend H____. Unfortunately it doesn’t meet our current needs. As you are doubtless aware, the market is tight and publishers are looking for bo

*The Common Reader
In The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, Queen Eliabeth I chances on a mobile library and, to be polite, takes out a couple of books, thereby starting herself on a literary road that takes unexpected turns, some humorous, some serious. To make such a prominent person (who is still alive and, given the longevitiy of the family, likely to be for another 20 years!) the main character of a work of fiction, takes guts. Alan Bennett writes with wit, intelligence, and a talent for surprise. I’ve experienced this w