Our Guilty Pleasures series featured literature academics writing about their guilty summer reads. Claire McGowan rounds it off by dismissing the term entirely. Between seeing author talks and comedy and…
Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. So said Elmore Leonard, prolific author of westerns, short stories and crime novels. He died last…
My early teenage summers were spent either on trips to India with my sister to see our friends and family, or at home in the UK. In either place they were full of long days spent reading on a veranda or…
As soon as the teaching term finished, I went into the bookshop to buy some holiday reading. I came away with three books: no tomes these. They were all graphic novels. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic…
I don’t often re-read books, partly because there are so many on my unread pile. There are just a few that I go back to over and over again: Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The Bell Jar – and Lucky Jim…
Welcome to Guilty Pleasures, a summer series in which academics reveal their most embarrassing cultural inclinations. Ever wanted to know what literature professors delve into on holiday, when they can’t…