Book Reviews – Interesting Literature

Book Review: Gavin Francis on Sir Thomas Browne

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

When I founded this blog back in 2012, it was with the principal aim of challenging misconceptions and taking a closer look at some of the things we commonly take for granted about literature, language, and myths. But the desire to debunk misconceptions is probably as ancient an impulse as writing itself, and perhaps even older. Now, in the 21^st century with so much information – and misinformation – all around us, that desire has become a necessary requirement.

Book Review: A. M. Burrage’s Uncanny Tales

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The writer A. M. Burrage once claimed that he wished ‘to give the reader a pleasant shudder, in the hope that he will take a lighted candle to bed with him’. But in fact, his ghost stories – a selection of which was published in a handsome edition by the British Library in 2022 – often succeed in doing far more than this.

Book Review: The Hard Way by Lee Child

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Hard Way is the quintessential Jack Reacher novel. When it was first published back in 2006, it was the tenth novel by Lee Child to feature the American ex-military policeman turned drifter and modern-day ‘knight errant’. Child’s publishing schedule had become as regular as Reacher’s inner clock (he has an uncanny knack for mentally keeping track of the passing of time even without a watch).

Book Review: East of the Wardrobe

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a new study of the unexpected worlds of C. S. Lewis

December has always been the month read C. S. Lewis. Perhaps it was growing up reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the land of Narnia being in the grip of a perpetual (if Christmas-free) winter; perhaps it’s because I have always had a soft spot for that moment in the 1993 Richard Attenborough biopic of Lewis’s life and love, Shadowlands, in which the choir of Oxford University sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ as Lewis negotiates the new relationship that is blossoming between him and Joy Davidman.

Book Review: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Of all the authors whose works most follow Kafka, Ferenc Karinthy is unlikely to be a name to leap to most readers’ lips. He remains virtually unknown in English-speaking countries. And yet his 1970 novel Metropole is a quintessential Kafkaesque piece which also, at times, manages to take Kafka’s ideas in new directions, recalibrating the central premise of Kafka’s work in startling and sometimes amusingly satirical ways.