The Common Reader

The Common Reader

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How to have good taste
Taste is knowledge.
 • 
Henry Oliver
109
How to get started reading English literature.
An introductory syllabus.
 • 
Henry Oliver
77
No, Taylor Swift is not Mary Shelley
The philistine supremacy is real.
 • 
Henry Oliver
107
Is Mary Oliver a good poet?
Uh, yeah she is. “The world offers itself to your imagination.”
 • 
Henry Oliver
83
What’s my thing?
Advice about how to “bloom”
 • 
Henry Oliver
22
Writing advice is a lie.
Just learn grammar and rhetoric instead
 • 
Henry Oliver
118
What to do about the decline of the humanities.
Stop complaining and just read the best books that you can and talk about them.
 • 
Henry Oliver
60
Here's a simple solution to the pessimism culture. Read a book.
If you want to break the doom loop, take the Jane Austen cure.
 • 
Henry Oliver
63
The modern discourse novel
Novelists who allow the internet to set limits on how they think
 • 
Henry Oliver
89
How I learned to love literary criticism.
What makes secondary literature worth reading for the common reader?
 • 
Henry Oliver
19
Reading Jane Austen
Learning to become a Janeite
 • 
Henry Oliver
11
Middlemarch is a novel about sympathising with everyone.
"Widening the skirts of light." Dorothea's self-reformation and her sympathy for Casaubon
 • 
Henry Oliver
13
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