“A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.”

—Mignon McLaughlin

(Source: vintageanchorbooks, via booklover)

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

Kurt Vonnegut

(I’ve been reading David Lodge’s Changing Places and I’ve discovered that it’s campus novel. It made me very excited, because I hadn’t been aware of existence of that term, so here’s what wikipedia has to say about it :) )

A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s. The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is often quoted as the earliest example.

Many well-known campus novels, such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and those of David Lodge, are comic or satirical, often counterpointing intellectual pretensions and human weaknesses. Some, however, attempt a serious treatment of university life; examples include C.P. Snow’s The Masters, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited that focus on students rather than faculty are often considered to belong to a distinct genre, sometimes termed varsity novels.

A subgenre is the campus murder mystery, where the closed university setting substitutes for the country house of Golden Age detective novels; examples include Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun’s Kate Fansler mysteries and Colin Dexter’s The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn.

see Significant examples

” There are good books, indifferent books, and bad books. Amongst the good books some are honest, inspiring, moving, prophetic and improving. But in my language there is another category: there are Ah! Books. This is one of them. Ah! Books are those which induce a fundamental change in the reader’s consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. Ah! Books are galvanic. They touch the nerve centre of the whole being so that the reader receives an almost palpable physical shock. A tremor of excited perception ripples through the person.

Ah! Books don’t come all that often, at least not my way. Andre Malraux’s The Psychology of Art was one of them. It was published just after the war. It was too expensive to buy but I located a copy of this luminous book in the Manchester Art Gallery; and i had to make several journeys by motor-cycle, often through sleet and snow until I had finished it. From time to time I wanted to get up on the table to proclaim its truth to all around me, or slap my next-desk neighbour over the back and say, ‘There you are; just get hold of that!’ Once I nearly did but just in time I noticed he was reading a text on the structure of plastics. By now, of course, I know that some people can get as much aesthetic pleasure out of contemplating the formula for a long molecule as others do from beholding a mural by Piero della Francesca. Technologists have their Ah! Moments too!

Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought - as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down.”

Vernon Sproxton, introduction for Fynn’s ‘Mister God, This is Anna’

 ”Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

J.R.R. Tolkien

(via dearprettythings)

(via prettybooks)

“Handsome, strong, gay … She felt again the thro and lilt of her blood. She had loved Kameni in that moment. She loved him now. Kameni could take the place that Khay had held in her life.
She thought: ‘We shall be happy together - yes, we shall be happy. We shall live together and take pleasure in each other and we shall have strong, handsome children. There will be busy days full of work … and days of pleasure when we sail on the River…Life will be again as I knew it with Khay…What could I ask more than that? What do I want more than that?’
And slowly, very slowly indeed, she turned her face towards Hori. It was as though, silently, she asked him a question.
As though he understood her, he answered:
‘When you were a child, I loved you. I loved your grave face and the confidence with which you came to me, asking me to mend your broken toys. And then, after eight years’ absence, you came again and sat here, and brought me the thoughts that were in your mind. And your mind, Renisenb, is not like the minds of the rest of your family. It does not turn in upon itself, seeking to encase itself in narrow walls. Your mind is like my mind, it looks over the River, seeing a world of changes, of new ideas - seeing a world where all things are possible to those with courage and vision…’
She broke off, unable to find words to frame her struggling thoughts. What life would be with Hori, she did not know. In spite of his gentleness, in spite of his love for her, he would remain in some respects incalculable and incomprehensible. They would share moments of great beauty and richness together - but what of their common daily life?
(…)
” I have made my choice, Hori. I will share my life with you for good or evil, until death comes…”
With his arms round her, with the sudden new sweetness of his face against hers, she was filled with an exultant richness of living.”

— Agatha Christie (Dead comes as the end)

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Philosophy

• Philosophy of Language
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