High Spirits, by Robertson Davies

Although we generally associate ghost stories with Halloween and October, there is a long tradition in Great Britain of telling ghost stories around the Christmas season. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a classic example, with Scrooge being haunted by spirits who offer him one last chance to see the error of his ways. Robertson [...]

Read Full Post »

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

The comparisons to Harry Potter are inevitable, but when Quentin Coldwater is recruited by Brakebills, a magical university hidden in upstate New York, he’s no wide-eyed eleven year old. Smart, anti-social, competitive, and melancholy, he’s designed his life to please Princeton’s admissions office. He took up performing magic tricks so that he could claim an [...]

Read Full Post »

Deaf Sentence, by David Lodge

If you enjoy sharp-witted and sometimes dark-edged novels about academia, you probably are familiar with the writer David Lodge. In his novels Small World, Changing Places, and Thinks, among others, Lodge has skewered the pretensions of academics and pointed out the petty jealousies and rivalries that can exist in the most staid of university departments. [...]

Read Full Post »

Rebel Angels, by Robertson Davies

They say, whoever “they” are, that good things come in threes. In the world of fiction, good things often come in trilogies, but they also come in fours, fives, or even greater numbers. This week, we’ll look at books in series that give readers the chance to enjoy characters over the course of three, or [...]

Read Full Post »

The Lyre of Orpheus, by Robertson Davies

Davies’s The Lyre of Orpheus is the final book in the Cornish Trilogy, whose first and third books are set in and around the life of students and scholars at a fictional university in Canada. Davies has an obvious affection for academics, but he also is unsparing in his portrayal of the petty jealousies and [...]

Read Full Post »

Rookery Blues, by Jon Hassler

Writing about the other fine arts is one of the most challenging things to pull off. Whether it is music, painting, or dance, it is difficult to capture on the page the subtleties that make these arts so appealing to listeners and viewers. That being said, there are some writers who do manage to convey [...]

Read Full Post »

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith

For the second entry in my week of humor books, I’m going to do something very stupid. I am going to recommend a book that I have never, ever, ever* been able to get anyone to read. The one person who tried gave up in disgust after a few pages. There is nothing to suggest [...]

Read Full Post »

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers

I love those Golden Age mysteries! I particularly love Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey series because she combines the Classic mystery story with a level of character development you do not generally see with Christie or Allingham. Sayers was ahead of her time, with the kind of complexity of personal relationships and empathy with the [...]

Read Full Post »

The Lecturer’s Tale, by James Hynes

James Hynes is a master of the macabre, and in The Lecturer’s Tale he turns his eye on the English Department at a large Midwestern University. Nelson Humboldt’s promising career as a professor has faded away, and he is reduced to teaching composition classes to the dregs of the English Department. Even here, Humboldt is [...]

Read Full Post »