Close Reading
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First 100 Words: ‘Frankenstein’
in 100 WordsA patronising man on ‘mysterious and important’ work. What could possibly go wrong? Perhaps he shouldn’t ignore a woman’s intuition, for starters.
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13.08 HG Wells
Wells seems repeatedly fascinated by what happens when intelligence outruns sympathy. Are you thinking of AI when you read that?
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From the Archives: 10.08.2018
Capulet’s party? A ‘meat-market’?! That’s what I called it eight years ago this week …
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Sylvia Plath – Spinster
in PoetryThis final stanza is horribly defensive with its ‘barb and check’. Suddenly we’re in a war-zone, under attack, fighting for our lives.
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09.08 Philip Larkin
I remember the first time I really noticed “spring-woken tree”. Honestly, I just thought: wow. I stopped reading … … and that is the biggest compliment I can pay any author
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Things Have Changed: the Moon in Romeo and Juliet
Even Plutarch gives us versions of the moon yearning after the sun. Although elsewhere they’re figured as siblings. God – those Ancient Greeks!
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08.08 Shirley Jackson
Horror shows us the monster. We react. Terror invites us to imagine it. We anticipate.
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First 100 words: ‘The Great Gatsby’
in 100 WordsAs a ‘cold reader’, I assume our narrator is Gatsby. On the whole, I’m not sure how much to trust or like him, yet.
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05.08 Toni Morrison
I don’t think Toni Morrison wasn’t writing greetings cards. Or motivational posters.
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Comfortably Numb: Medicine in Richard II
“Hello? Is there anybody in there?” Richard II is too comfortably numb to listen to deathbed advice from his dissenting uncle.