Sitemap - 2024 - The Common Reader

Year in review, 2024

Judi Dench is honest about acting

Christmas, science, context, suicide, E.B. White, Bear, Piranesi, James, reading, epigraphs?, Murdoch, selfish, X, smells, Potter, gpt philosophy, PhD, rating Austen, American fantasy?, Art job

Brandon Taylor: I want to bring back all of what a novel can do.

How Prospero repents.

Book Club 2025

Shakespeare Schedule 2025

The rareness of good readers?

The books I enjoyed most this year, 2024.

How I learned to love literary criticism.

Death, Sociology, Crime, Knowledge, Jargon, Novels, Men

J.R.R. Tolkien the poet in search of lost time.

Poetry Book Club SUNDAY 19.00 UK TIME

Unstylish style in Vanity Fair.

Rundell, Ibsen, Gogh, Yoshida, Tanizaki, Atwood, Dolan, Bate, Chaucer, Orbital, Liberalism, Future, Monsters, Justice, Autism, Ass

Zena Hitz: reading the Great Books

Nelson in the Arctic. Polar bears, geese, and filled breeches.

Can the philistine supremacy be stopped?

Context Collapse is a very bad poem.

Learning to love. How the poet Dana Gioia discovered his vocation through music.

Coriolanus, literary theory, bad fiction, literary utility, Grimms, shelves, Public humanities, dead novels, fictional therapy, Where is our Milton of the space age?, Austen's sisters, AI art

AUTUMN SALE 25% OFF FOREVER

Can fiction improve you?

Marion Turner: Chaucer's world

Influences in Nelson's early career

An Inkling defends The Winter's Tale

Children deserve Shakespeare, not teachers who promote ignorance.

Winter's Tale, Tempest Book Club

We wander in illusions.

Twenty-five facts about The Winter's Tale

Shakespeare's experiments.

Notes towards an applied literature

What is good dialogue?

Politics, Oliver Sacks, Proust, Korea, Clutter, Levy, Psalms, Earnings, Status

Naomi Kanakia: How Great are the Great Books?

How real should fiction be?

Troilus' godly jealousy.

Horatio Nelson: The Darling Hero of England

The Real Thing? Stoppard at the Old Vic

The Moon, Sixpence, and Sally Rooney

How Shakespeare turned Plutarch into poetry

Catherine Lacey: internet geography

Troilus & Cressida, Antony& Cleopatra Night Book Club

“You can never be wise until you learn to love reading.”

What good is the New York Times?

Visionary madness, Godless novels!?, Modernism’s cultural drift, Is culture stuck?, Complicated Odysseus, Can't read: won't read, Knausgaard and Scott and good bad writing, BBC bathos, Towards Zero

Writing advice is a lie.

The untold life of Helen Taylor

What are the best works of literature about business and capitalism?

Neurodiversity and normal people in Intermezzo.

'We know what we are.' Mating: a romance of rationalism and pragmatism.

MAGGIE SMITH RIP

The Millstone, by Margaret Drabble

SALLY ROONEY

DeWitt, Rooney, Tolstoy and Gary Kemp, Is Culture Dying?, Against Re-reading, The New Sincerity, Death, World Literature 1600, Cecil the beagle, Totoro, Good Bad Taste

The Reader’s Quest. How literature helps us find meaning and understand the world.

The Romantic philosopher

But tell me true, are you not mad indeed?

Tonight's Live Video

Nabeel Qureshi: literature requires the fuller engagement of your soul.

Vote for the GOAT British novelist

Trivialising ourselves to death.

Goethe, James, Evenings, Writing, Hitler, Elites, Serotonin, Piranesi, Breath, Elmet, Angel, Gilead

How networks really work.

Hamlet & Twelfth Night Book Club

Predicting the wrong ending.

Who is the best British novelist?

Why Ted Chiang was wrong

Waiting your way to the top. Dwight Eisenhower's slow career.

The busyness of Hamlet

Is Substack awful?

Hollis Robbins: literature makes you a mind reader

Who's afraid of reading books?

Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley

Catcher in the Rye, How to Read, Arsy-versy, Pope Francis, AI Cheating, Austen and abolition, Diaries in the 1560s, Conrad, highcounterculture, handwriting, memorising poetry, Graves vs Milton, Lewis

Revisiting Larkin.

Twenty seven facts about Hamlet

Why can't AI write a great novel?

London's best secret art gallery

Poetry Book Club TODAY 19.00 UK TIME

James Marriott. The value of being pretentious and the importance of the emotions to the intellect.

Elites need to be honest about highbrow culture

Can fiction succeed on Substack? How serialised novels can work with modern technology.

Here's a simple solution to the pessimism culture. Read a book.

Was Shakespeare gay?

A.N. Wilson. Walking in mysteries.

Will AI create a new creative renaissance?

No, Taylor Swift is not Mary Shelley

Shakespeare club update

Why I read children's books

Be serious, Mother reader, Critic friend, AI, Franchise, Mozart, Moby Dick, War and Peace, Internet novels

Impossible Creatures, by Katherine Rundell

The biographer's morality

Why rage against a good night?

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The modern discourse novel

Lolita is not a moral test

Give me leave to speak my mind

The Clerk's Tale and the expectation of astonishment

Ireland rejected James Joyce. Did he reject it back?

As You Like It Book Club

I met a fool in the forest

Baliol Holloway, forgotten Shakespearean actor

Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare

The unlikely similarity of J.S. Mill and Samuel Johnson.

How to Read a Poem: division, allegory, ambiguity, irony

Why I write the Common Reader

Shakespeare and the Poets' War

On Civilization

Festivals, debuts, syntax, and Kafka

Deep, still, seeable. Seamus Heaney's letters.

When life is too much like a pathless wood

Ten of the best books about late bloomers and late blooming talent

Did Shakespeare chose not to think in Much Ado About Nothing?

How Shakespeare rehearsed

International Booker

Much Ado Book Club

Is the plain style the same as minimalism?

The plain style or the ornate?

What made the Inklings a significant literary group?

Nineteen facts about Much Ado About Nothing

Launch day for Second Act!

Levy discourse, Is Milton any good!? lol, Nigerian lit crit, Luther, Bluestockings, Pompeii, Mothers, Liberty, prosody

Fifty late bloomers

On Imitation

Helen Vendler and the Recognition of Black Poetry.

Andrew Lang and the catawampus of Romance

Why Falstaff is fat.

Robert Frost's accidental late start

Ha ha! Ha ha!, Obituary of a quiet life, Internet culture, Black box, Frost, Shakespeare (3x), Zola and the modern novel, teaching poetry, LLMs

On Hope

Patricia Highsmith's womb of her own

Paul Graham's plain rhetoric

Shakespeare's breakthrough in Henry IV

Is Mary Oliver a good poet?

Sex, madness, and death. Elizabeth Jenkins' overlooked masterpiece.

Henry IV book club

What about the people who never found their calling?

Who is Falstaff?

How Penelope Fitzgerald became a late blooming novelist.

“Unkept Good Fridays”

Accuracy vs specificity.

Death, green, boxers, Bluestockings, devil, dragon, Bartleby, Deor

Two leadership lessons from Shakespeare's Henriad

Why do we look at photographs

The soul moved the pen, and broke it.

What is English meter?

Who's afraid of A.C. Bradley?

The life of a common reader

Knights and Hawkes: inside Shakespeare's dream

Raye. Revenge of a late bloomer.

Love's Labour's Lost book club

Twenty-five ideas about Love's Labour's Lost

Welcome to the age of the late bloomer

Late bloomers, Iliad, strategic romance, classic physics, Murdoch v Amis, Swift's grammar, opera boy, long sentences, Hayek/Mill/game theory

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

How to raise a (happy) genius

1791 Mozart's Last Year. H. C. Robbins Landon

Doppelgänger, by Naomi Klein

Iris Murdoch, a novelist for now.

On Advertising.

Romeo's dark side

Iris Murdoch's philosophical fiction

Romeo and Juliet Book Club

Ely Cathedral and the beauty of progress.

The limits of mimesis. Seeing Others, by Michèle Lamont. Educated, by Tara Westover.

What does fiction aim to do?

Thirty facts about Romeo and Juliet

On Humour

How to be a late bloomer

Airline comedy, Flaubert, the hotness of Jane Eyre, Renaissance book wheels, Taylor Swift, Jane Austen, and a Saxon Psalter.

Shakespeare's characters

Noël Coward's Talent to Amuse.

How to have good taste

David Brooks and the moral purpose of self-help

How to read Shakespeare

Shakespeare Schedule

Seventieth anniversaries. 1954 in English literature and beyond.

Magic, Eliot, cherries, fashion, Mozart, Flaubert, whale.

How Mozart became Mozart