Word: readerly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...election, and Lemaster may have some dirt on him--they were college roommates--and the Carlyles' brilliant daughter Vanessa is obsessed with a cold case from 30 years ago involving a white girl who may or may not have been killed by a black teenager. It will all, the reader can be grimly certain, fit together and will somehow dovetail with the old amusement park haunted by p-p-p-pirate ghosts...
...connections and incestuous politics with its own nasty prejudices: "As her grandmother used to say, there are our black people and there are other black people--and all her life Julia had secretly believed it." The shock value of this revelation wears off early, leaving little to sustain the reader through the 500 or so pages that remain. The only takeaway seems to be--to paraphrase that famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway--that rich black people are different from rich white people. They're black...
...Chesil Beach had me sympathizing with Edward and Florence equally, but my wife sided with Florence. Did you want the reader to side with one or the other? - Nathaniel Winn LITTLE ELM, TEXAS...
...opposed to, say, epic or satirical poetry) and for being obsessed with formal experimentation. He dissed M.F.A. programs for churning out careerist, cookie-cutter poets who were "sustained by a system of fellowships, grants, and other subsidies that absolve recipients of the responsibility to write books that a reader who is not a specialist might enjoy, might even...
...This is not the first time this kind of free-range lunacy has been visited upon me. Indeed, it happens, oh, once a week to each of us who post on Swampland (Karen Tumulty, Jay Carney and Ana Marie Cox are the others). A reasonable reader might ask, Why are the left-wing bloggers attacking you? Aren't you pretty tough on the Bush Administration? Didn't you write a few months ago that George W. Bush would be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in history? And why on earth does any of this matter...