Citing Queen and the wonderful Freddy Mercury is always a good idea, though their song “A Kind of Magic” does not really refer to what I have in mind. Written by drummer Roger Taylor for the film Highlander in 1986, this song speaks of transcending time as the immortals in the movie’s fable do. However, […]
Happy 2025! May it brings the world the peace we so much need and is at least marginally better than we expect right now, three days before the second inauguration of President Trump (President Musk? President Trusk? President Mump?). First, a confession: I’m distracted this semester with other personal and professional matters and I’m finding […]
I have written here at least twice about introductions. Back in 2011 (how time passes!!), I wrote a post about the introductions to British drama, which I was then teaching, and then in 2017 another post about Scottish literature. My point was similar and it is still similar today: no matter how brief the introduction, […]
The GoodReads Choice Awards for 2024 were published three days ago and this is, then, the right time to take a look and see what they say about the platform and its readers. The most obvious implicit statement is that this is a heavily biased platform, with a very high presence of US readers and […]
[This is a really complicated semester, with lots to mark and edit, and pressing personal issues, which explains why I’m being so irregular in my supposedly weekly posting. Apologies!] Today I’m writing about writers and my parasitical syndrome. You may have heard of impostor syndrome (feeling you’re underqualified for a task you’re doing proficiently) and […]
[No, I’m not writing about Donald Trump’s victory. I don’t agree with any of the analyses I have read and there will be time enough to consider the catastrophes that his cabinet will cause in the USA and around the world. If we survive.] A couple of my students asked me how come I have […]
The experiment I am running in the fourth-year core subject Contemporary Fiction in English is progressing well, but there are some snags that I’d like to address here. Here we go, then. We have now finished Unit 1 (1990-1997) and have started Unit 2 (1998-2006) and even though most students have finished reading the […]
I have shared in class with my students the article by Gaby Hinsliff’s “I Fear Books Are Going the Way of Vinyl Records – A Rarefied Pursuit for Hobbyists” published in The Guardian a couple of months ago. This article begins as the typical piece on summer reading to take then a turn towards the […]
I’m writing today in the hopes of better developing an idea I didn’t have time to expand on in class yesterday. I have been thinking about the meaning of the ‘contemporary’, both in the sense of how we consume books and which layers (I will explain) compose the totality of books at our disposal. […]
It turns out I have published 30 reviews, all of them of academic books, and I have two more about to be issued, which amounts more or less to one per year on average in the 33 years I have been an academic. For me, the most memorable for me is, no doubt, my […]