Word: readerly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...London two years later, but her mother and sister died in concentration camps in 1943. Shanti, meanwhile, joined the British army as a dentist and lost his arm at the battle of Monte Cassino. After the war he married Henny and, astonishingly, took up dentistry again. So what? a reader might ask. "I wasn't sure there would be any interest in this story," Seth confides from the office of his London publisher. "My mother asked me to interview Shanti Uncle because he was sick and lonely. She thought it would cheer him, and I thought it was my duty...
...variations on the theme that are hardly more optimistic. Their central characters, while not quite killed, lose virtually everything else along with their visibility -- jobs, apartments, girlfriends, respectability. Invisibility, these novels suggest, is a difficult and dangerous condition, and there is no fun in it. Except, happily, for the reader...
...very first page of Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie's new novel, the reader has a horrible presentiment that a literary disaster is in the making. Rushdie is trying to describe a woman speaking in her sleep: she is "like Sigourney Weaver channeling a demon in Ghostbusters." This is the kind of bathos?the desperation to prove his hipness by making asinine references to pop culture?that helped sink Rushdie's last novel, Fury, generally acknowledged to be the worst he has written. After a first-page blunder like this, it requires a leap of faith simply to turn...
...regular reader of blogs, or indeed of any kind of news website, you've probably been frustrated from time to time by information overload: the blogosphere creates way too much material for any human being to comfortably digest. Plus, there's no way of knowing when your favorite sites are updated. Some of the best blog writers publish once a week or less, and who has time to keep visiting these sites in the hope of finding a fresh item...
...only reader bewildered by essayist Michelle Cottle's "My Roving Barcalounger" [Aug. 1], in which she complains about all the distractions in her new minivan? No one made her get a car with bells and whistles like a DVD player, a satellite radio, a five-CD changer and three cell-phone outlets. Whether, deep down, Cottle wanted all those gadgets or just gave into the snob appeal of the fanciest model, she has only herself to blame for filling her vehicle with so many distractions...