The little white attic

I know, I wrote that the last blog post was my response once and for all to the mantra “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” But I want to...

Nabokov says in Strong Opinions :  “The word “genius” is passed around rather generously, isn’t it? At least in English, because its Russian...

As a little break from Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels , I’ve been reading Chekhov (who can be a better companion when one’s got the morbs?).  ...

Is Don Quixote my new obsession? Well, as you can see…  After Fighting Windmills: Encounter with Don Quixote , a very good book by Manuel Du...

In Lectures on Russian Literature , Nabokov writes:  “Russian critics have noted that Chekhov's style, his choice of words and so on, di...

That got your attention, didn’t it? This blog post is, unfortunately, not about sex, but about what I look for when reading, what I value an...

1/ Nabokov’s lecture on Anna Karenina (from Lectures on Russian Literature ) is a great companion to Tolstoy’s novel. One of his most inter...

- 10 favourite novels (updated):  The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu  Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy M...

Mansfield Park is, to me, Jane Austen’s best written book. In the last 2 blog posts about the book, I was writing about the characters and ...

Soon we will enter the 2020s, so let’s talk about our reading over the past decade, shall we?   1/ I came to Norway in 2009—before this, I ...