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 […]
This is the last post of the current academic year (2023-24), in which I have written relatively few posts (only 39) because I have been writing yet another book (Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future, Liverpool UP) and getting the Spanish translation ready, both for next year. Nothing saps […]
One of my colleagues has just retired and among the many books of his extensive library that he has given away (for that’s what happens with the books we store in our offices) I have rescued John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? (Faber & Faber, 2005). I have very fond memories of reading Carey’s […]
I have been keeping a list of all the books I read since I was 14, in part as a way to check that I am reading every year as much as I think I should. I learned from an article I found last Summer in El País that I am a ‘super-reader’, that is […]
The article by Héctor García Barnés published in El Confidencial, “There are people in Spain who read 80, 150 or 300 books a year, and it is not as difficult as it sounds”, draws powerful attention both for the cases it presents of constant readers and for the rather negative comments they receive. According to […]
El artículo de Héctor García Barnés publicado en El Confidencial, “Hay gente en España que lee 80, 150 o 300 libros al año, y no es tan difícil como suena”, llama poderosamente la atención tanto por los casos que presenta de grandes lectores como por los comentarios más bien negativos que éstos reciben en los […]
Allow me to begin by venting my massive annoyance with the new platform which my university has chosen to keep track of our academic activities, as if ORCID, Academia.edu, and my own webpage were not enough. I have spent two and a half complete working days trying to make sense of its user-unfriendly approach to […]
I’m beginning with this post the tenth year of this blog, started back in September 2010, with a certain feeling that blogging is already a thing of the past. As the yearly volumes accumulate (check https://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328), I see how text-based online platforms give way to image-based platforms, with Instagram in the lead, already replacing Twitter […]