Thomas Stearns Eliot September 26th, 2019 @ 8:17 am PDT
I grow old. I grow old.
Would You Eat Them in a Boat? March 2nd, 2019 @ 8:34 am PST
Happy birthday, Theodor Geisel!
On Loving Sports September 19th, 2018 @ 8:52 am PDT
“Almost winning is almost the best. But you’ve got to win once in a while.”
1984 June 25th, 2015 @ 7:37 am PDT
Happy birthday to Eric Blair — better known as George Orwell — born on this date in 1903, seventy years and one day before yours truly. My dad told me to read Animal Farm when I was seven years old. I thought it was really wild, but that there had to be something that I […]
On Books June 7th, 2015 @ 8:45 am PDT
We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif — books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, […]
Advice to Writers January 29th, 2015 @ 8:21 am PST
On Pride and Prejudice January 28th, 2015 @ 10:38 am PST
Happy birthday to a book I’ve never read: Pride and Prejudice was published for the first time 202 years ago today. “I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time […]
a thousand thousand slimy things October 21st, 2014 @ 9:05 am PDT
[Today is] the birthday of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England (1772). He was a very ambitious young man, who lectured on religion, wrote journalism, and single-handedly tried to launch his own magazine. But he was exhausting himself and falling into a depression when he was introduced […]
Happy Birthday, W. Somerset Maugham January 25th, 2014 @ 2:34 pm PST
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” W. Somerset Maugham, January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965
Notes from History May 7th, 2013 @ 4:21 am PDT
Talk about a literary adventure! A note from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an unknown stranger is found inscribed in a book. Almost a hundred years later, the wife of a professor — who was a friend of Fitzgerald’s daughter — notices that the last page of the book has been removed, and uses the ol’ […]
