Marginalia
Marginalia is where readers leave traces of themselves in books. These essays explore rereading, forgotten novels, literary fashions, and the changing relationship between texts and the people who encounter them. Some begin with a book. Others begin with a question. All are attempts to think a little more carefully about what reading is for.
-
A Tale of Two Bards …
Imagine discovering a collaboration between Aretha Franklin and Kurt Cobain? Or Robert Plant and Amy Winehouse? Or Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix? Massive excitement (and hypocrisy?) at Upstart HQ.
-
Pieces of Hate …
in Marginalia‘They came for Treasure Island, and I did not complain because I wasn’t a fan of Treasure Island …’ Where do we draw the lines between adapting and appropriating books, shipmates? It it OK to strip-mine a text because the author isn’t alive to complain?
-
Live Forever … ?
in MarginaliaAre film adaptations of books a kind of parasitic organism which sucks the lifeblood from the original text?
-
What We (Might) Be Reading in 2027
in MarginaliaLooking forward to the book industry in 2027 tells us a lot about society in 2025/6. Who else is going to the Publishers’ Roadshow?
-
An Unexpected Literary Pilgrimage
in MarginaliaWe are too fond of putting writers on pedestals. We turn them into portraits, movements, dates, themes and quotations, until the person can almost disappear behind the literature. Literary pilgrimage has a way of re-humanising authors.
-
Elizabethan Stages. Jacobean Shadows.
in MarginaliaThe grisly and the gothic, and a gap in my reading. Then, a tour of Shakespearean criticism, hopefully to be followed by the realities of staging the plays during his lifetime.
-
Unlikely Shelf-Mates?
in MarginaliaAny normal, sane person feels the need for post-apocalyptic body horror now and again. Don’t they?
-
100 posts: what HAVE I been thinking?
in MarginaliaNot a content plan – more an organic map of what’s occupied my mind since May, and what you can find in my first 100 posts here.
-
Day Zero: ‘Where is my Mind?’ Here!
in MarginaliaTwenty-six thousand words on English Literature? I’m just getting started. Come and join the conversation.
-
What A Way To Go, by Bella Mackie (2024)
in MarginaliaAusten’s forensic observations of society wield the same scalpel; Mackie’s don’t bother to sew up the corpse with the neat stitches of ‘happy ever after’.