Early in his career, English footballer Michael Owen celebrated goals by rubbing his hands together in a joyous “Goody! Goody! Goody!” show of enthusiasm. Book lovers feel something similar when learning of a book that captures their imagination and produces a swell of anticipation that is almost inevitably more expansive than whatever pleasures the book […]
Early Saturday on my balcony. September. Over the horizon, the sun idles, seemingly as cool as the morning air. My coffee steams. I treasure this time for reading and shouldn’t let anything spoil my enjoyment of an entertaining tale. Yet even the smallest editing mistakes can do just that. When the scene above played out, […]
A word or phrase that conveys nothing but its surface meaning to one person brings with it a whole host of associations for someone else. Literature—great and otherwise—abounds with allusion, so one is never just reading a single work but also all of the works being referenced. Scholars happily—and, yes, smugly, often insufferably so—spend their […]
I’ve never applied eye black before tackling a manuscript. My reading glasses, I’ll readily admit, don’t even come close to saying badass the way that eye black does. Still, with the kickoff of the NFL season scant hours away, it occurs to me that there’s a position on the gridiron not all too dissimilar to […]
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