Book Review – Interesting Literature

Book Review: John Plotz on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews John Plotz’s personal reading of a fantasy classic by Ursula K. Le Guin

The American author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is widely regarded as one of the finest authors of what is broadly termed ‘speculative fiction’. During the course of her long writing career, she wrote novels and short stories in both the fantasy and science-fiction genres. She has also long been praised as one of the greatest stylists within these genres, with an ability to pick up, as Chesterton said of Robert Louis Stevenson, the right word on the end of her pen.

Book Review: Rooms of Their Own

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a book about the rooms in which great writers worked

‘Writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people, making the table, the chair, the curtain, the carpet into their own image.’

So wrote Virginia Woolf in Great Men’s Houses (1911), several years before she would transform the humble room into a space of daydreaming, reverie, and imagination in her famous short story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, and almost two decades before she would give the series of Cambridge lectures which inspired the title of both her best-known work of non-fiction and, with a slight change, the title of Alex Johnson’s Rooms of Their Own.

Illuminating Histories: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews James Raven’s erudite and informative history of that ubiquitous invention, the book

In the Exeter Book, one of the jewels in the crown of Anglo-Saxon literature, a riddle appears which begins:

Some enemy deprived me of my life
And took away my worldly strength, then wet me,
Dipped me in water, took me out again,
Set me in sunshine …

Hello Goodbye Hello: Famous Writers Who Met Each Other

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discovers the extraordinary meetings of famous writers

J. D. Salinger met Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway met Ford Madox Ford. Ford Madox Ford met Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde met Marcel Proust. Marcel Proust met James Joyce. Some of the most famous writers of the last century met each other, but they also met the great and good from beyond the literary world. And the not so great and not so good. H. G. Wells, for instance, met Josef Stalin.

Craig Brown’s book Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings, which was published in 2011, is an interesting ‘dipping’ book: each encounter between two notable people is given a short entry, a mini-essay, outlining the details of the meeting. This makes it a fascinating book to read in fits and starts (probably the best way to read a book like this), since you effectively learn something new, and surprising, about two famous people at once. It’s also a great premise for a book, the sort that must have had writers of such non-fiction books kicking themselves for having failed to come up with such a neat conceit. Each meeting documented in the book is linked by one of the contributors, so that Maxim Gorky’s encounter with Tolstoy leads into Tolstoy’s meeting with Tchaikovsky, just as George

A Dictionary of Unusual and Preposterous Words

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revels in the arcane lexicography of Mrs Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words

The word deboswellize means ‘to deprecate someone in a biography’. It’s derived from James Boswell, the celebrated biographer of Samuel Johnson. Anaxiphilia means ‘the act of falling in love with someone entirely inappropriate, by someone who should know better’. More emotive, and dripping with unspoken and tragic hopelessness, is the word anacampserote, which refers to ‘something which can bring back a lost love.’

None of these three words is likely to be on the tongues (or in the minds) of the average reader, and they were new to me until I recently encountered them, in Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual Obscure and Preposterous Words: Gathered from Numerous and Diverse Authoritative Sources, which may just be the most endlessly fascinating and entertaining lexicon I’ve yet encountered. (I’ll except the Oxford English Dictionary here, and possibly Johnson’s dictionary, on the grounds that they are beyond question in the fascination stakes for the sheer vastness of their achievement.)