Profile avatar
ahernahern.bsky.social
Teaching writing and reading to kids who can already read and write
113 posts 130 followers 402 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 14 Comments 36

‘War & Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy 1869 – Volume 4 It’s odd to think that Tolstoy wrote this rather sprawling mass of a novel ten years before his masterpiece ‘Anna Karenina’. Is the ‘canvas too big’? Did Tolstoy bite off more than he could chew? Perhaps. But, despite bursting at the seams with good…

submitted 15 hours ago • 0 comments

The privilege of being straight is that you never have to look for these symbols. You don’t have to wait for someone to clock you or your partner, and wait to see how they’ll react. It is easy when you’ve had that privilege to eye-roll about symbolism and how unnecessary it feels…

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Absolutely fascinating (and a tad worrying) - especially, I admit, if you, like me, 'did' it for A-Level when you were 16/17.

submitted 4 days ago • 14 comments

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli (2013) Apparently much acclaimed, and well regarded, or at least the front cover would have you believe; but only a little bit of digging points to a pretty consistently high level of acclaim and regard, though with the usual smattering of ‘what is this…

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (1897) Plumbing depths. As well as really having to read all the prose Chekhov has written since the late 1880s, his four-act plays – ‘The Seagull’ (1896), ‘Uncle Vanya (1897), ‘Three Sisters’ (1901) and ‘The Cherry Orchard’ (1904) should also be read; but why are we…

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Woolf (1972) And along came this! But what reader of ‘literary’ fiction takes science fiction all that seriously? Yes, it does have a very bad rep, if only because readers often can’t get past the first 30,000 words of complex in-depth world building that can…

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison (2002) What has been described “tense, moving, and hilarious”, a “dark jewel of a novel”, a “book of piercing intellect and belligerent humour”, said to have has a “profound impact… on the shape of the contemporary novel” is also a shapeless collection of random…

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (2021) What are our obligations? What is called “an exciting, ambitious debut”, this young author is “trying to compose images that portray a rhythm”, yet it always feels like we’re doing this young author a favour by reading his novel, as much as the reviewers on…

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2018) What the Guardian dismiss as a minor quibble, after quibbling it, I think is more or less a fundamental flaw in any novel: that which is “never really earned” in a novel. There is so much that happens here, in a novel that little or nothing happens,…

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

“Surely it’s the sign of a remarkable work of art that it cannot be pinned down to any one definition, that you can find something new in it at each encounter.” On 100 years of Mrs. Dalloway.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Lincoln Michel recommends 10 novels with mind-blowing structures by Alejandro Zambra, Renee Gladman, Percival Everett and more!

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931) This is one of those big ideas novels that can feel overwhelming to read, pushing the reader to reflect on themselves and the world they are in: isn’t this what fiction is for? A novel in a series if dramatic soliloquies interspersed with passages of…

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021) This is the kind of thing that people are reading. What people want. A ‘runaway success’. What books, it seems, should do. Engage you above all else. And once they have you, these books, what do they do with you? Well, nothing else. It’s just engagement, pure…

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Oh Tolstoy: Get over yourself!War & Peace – Volumes 2 &3 On reading ‘War and Peace’ a second time, some seven years later, I find myself more bothered by the bits where Tolstoy is labouring his point – how did I forget these stretches? More often than not, Tolstoy is on one of his hobbyhorses to…

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments