This is the first sentence in the chapter titled “Plurals before Swine: Blunders with Numbers” in Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner. The tone is light-hearted, which, as the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer noted, makes it readable “even for those … Read More
Category: non-fiction
“A writer’s goal is to light up the sky.”
“The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders.”
Recently, I visited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord, MA, which has the chair that Emerson sat in while he wrote his famous essay “Nature.” As a fan of what Anne Fadiman calls “You-Are-There Reading” I had to reacquaint myself with this wonderful piece. When it was published in 1836, … Read More
“[L]adies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”
Purely by coincidence, I was reading Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own during the week that the first woman became the presumptive nominee for a major political party in the U.S. In 1928, when Woolf gave a series of lectures on “Women and Fiction,” she described the differences in … Read More
“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”
Simultaneously a “breathtaking memoir” and a “small instant classic of nature writing,” this book juggles multiple themes and techniques. One often-used technique is metaphor: we meet a fellow who is as “serene as a mid-ocean wave” and see the deer “ankle their way out of the … Read More
“Why, you may ask, should you write serious nonfiction as a story?”
The authors’ answer to this question: “[T]he first job of any book is to get itself read.” Narrative tension, they observe, “remains a highly effective tool for keeping the reader engaged with the material” (179). If that’s so, why don’t all writers use narrative techniques? Perhaps because it’s harder to … Read More
Best of 2015 Books
2015 has been a wonderful year for publishers and readers. My “Best of 2015” list consists of the books that I am most likely to read again. In the memoir category, Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fourth volume of My Struggle is part of a series that I believe will be … Read More
“Anders was often the only one not invited to come and stroke other children’s new puppies or kittens.”
They didn’t invite Anders Breivik to see their pets because they knew that he tortured his pet rats by poking them with pencils. One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway provides layers of details about the man who killed 77 people in Norway in … Read More
“Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story,”
Researchers now believe that the average daydream is 14 seconds long, and we have about 2,000 of them each day (11). Scientists used to believe that humans dreamed in a story-like way only during their REM sleep cycles; it’s now thought that story-like dreams occur independent of REM and across … Read More
“Examine each position they take, and ask yourself ‘Why?'”
Negotiations often start with the question “What do you want?” The more important question, according to the authors of this classic book on negotiation theory, is “Why do you want that?” Understanding the interests that determine the positions is critical when searching for a wise solution. It isn’t easy. While … Read More
“Teaching is situational.”
One of the first lessons that new teachers learn is that it’s impossible to predict how well a workshop, lecture or discussion will work. Teaching is situational. What works well in one class might not work in another. That’s why Stephen D. Brookfield, one of the most respected scholars … Read More
“The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
The power of this final sharp sentence in the essay “The Santa Ana” by Joan Didion comes, in part, from the preceding sentence’s beautiful set-up: “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way … Read More
“Let us start this preposterous journey in the most British way imaginable: with a series of meandering apologies and caveats.”
With this first sentence, I was hooked on this collection of stand-up routines and one-liners by BBC writer Fraser McAlpine. With an addiction to Downton Abbey, a life-long love of the Beatles, strong memories of Princess Diana, and a daughter named Anna who lives in England, I am an … Read More
“Whatever your ailment, our prescriptions are simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals.”
Finding the right book at the right time — isn’t that what we all want? It certainly is one of the central obsessions in my world. That’s why I’m delighted to discover The Novel Cure, which provides 751 suggestions for novels that can “cure” certain problems. The premise is that … Read More
