Book Reviews – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

Book Review: The Book Lover’s Almanac

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Alex Johnson’s new compendium of ‘on this day’ literary nuggets

I began this blog eleven years ago to this day, back on 1 December 2012. Since then, I have broadened my range from curious facts about literary genres and specific authors to more in-depth analysis of classic works of literature, as well as some less canonical books, poems, and other literary texts. I’ve even branched out and started analysing song lyrics, whenever a particular song strikes me as worthy of discussion, or whenever I learn something curious about a song or artist.

The Book of Books: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kristin Swenson’s fascinating and accessible introduction to the Bible

In the earliest New Testament writings, the mother of Jesus doesn’t even have a name. Paul says simply that Jesus was born from a woman, and there are very few references to the Virgin Mary in the earliest Gospel. Mark mentions a Mary, and he also mentions the mother of Jesus, but the context is ambiguous: it isn’t clear whether he is even referring to the same person. And in Luke’s Gospel, the adult Jesus effectively rejects his own mother.

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 …

The Machine Restarts: Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Asimov’s second Robot novel which eerily prefigures our world

On the planet of Solaria, people don’t ‘see’ each other: ‘seeing’ is viewed as abnormal, even dirty, because it means coming into contact with other people’s breath, germs, and sweaty bodies. Instead, Solarians ‘view’ each other via screens, being in different buildings – or even different rooms in the same building – when they converse with each other. Inhabitants of Solaria quite literally cannot bear to be in the same room as each other, even their own spouses or children.

‘But now there is no ever going home’: A Poem about the Year 2020

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle introduces his own venture into the world of poetry

At the beginning of 2020 I had little faith in this Government, but it turns out I was stupidly optimistic. Johnson (‘agent of chaos’, as I like to call him, after the Norman Spinrad novel of 1967 which features a protagonist called Boris Johnson) and his Cabinet have attracted widespread opprobrium in the wake of the double-whammy of a looming no-deal Brexit and the chaotic response to the coronavirus pandemic.