Sitemap - 2025 - The Common Reader

What to do about the decline of the humanities.

Austen, Hating the Odyssey, Rooney and politics, Explaining Howl, Becoming Christian, Gilgamesh, Naipaul, Bradstreet, Shakespeare and maths, Panpyschism

Adam Smith's impartial spectator

You make your own luck.

Start here.

Thirty-one facts about Richard II

RIP Jane Gardam

The superiority of Studio Ghibli—over Disney and over AI slop.

Clare Carlisle: George Eliot's Double Life.

Richard II book club

Proto, Lantana, Arcana, Mobius, Velasco, Uchida

Is this AGI? (Not quite, I think...)

Middlemarch is a novel about sympathising with everyone.

Matt Yglesias: reading books makes me feel calmer.

If men want to get published again, they need to write great novels.

Sense and Sensibility is a quest narrative

On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle

Sense and Sensibility book club

Does Jane Austen undermine her own endings? No. No she does not.

Jane Austen's alternative endings.

Why I hate Wuthering Heights

What’s my thing?

Twenty-one facts (and opinions) about A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Katherine Dee. Finding life where others don't.

Midsummer Night's Dream book club

Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption

Shakespeare's first tipping point

Rachel Herrington is reading the St. Johns curriculum. You can join her.

How to get started reading English literature.

Frost, AI, Classics, Eliot, Taste, Love, Emre, Schiller, Slop, Orfeo, Wright, Aphantasia, Lists, Leopard

Books for ambitious 14-17 year old students?

Agnes Callard: what is the value of fiction?

What does pride mean in Pride and Prejudice?

How to read the opening of a novel

Will AI have a taste all of its own?

Spark, Proto, Hum.

Twenty-five facts about The Comedy of Errors

The lives of the authors.

The twenty best English poets

Comedy of Errors Book Club

The funeral bus.

Mr. Bennet and the mischief of neglect

Nelson, patronage, and meritocracy

Pride and Prejudice book club

AI and the future of literature.

Read more, Generations, Hill, Post-feminist Austen, Marketing Tolstoy, Delve, Book Tok, Close Reading, Anthology, Reverse Engineering, AI firms, Publishing, Sontag, Who Cares?, Serious Joke Poems

Pride and Poverty? Lizzy Bennet's financial prospects.

Founders over fifty.

Shakespeare the economist.

Does Jane Austen hate you?

Natasha Joukovsky: literature, capitalism, and Jane Austen.

Does the flame of genius burn past 30?

Richard III: a close reading

Literary culture can't just dismiss AI.

Why is Harry Potter quite so influential?

Richard III Book Club

A place where knowledge is ours for the taking.

Twenty-nine facts about Richard III

Shakespeare's stirring world.

Is Atlas Shrugged the new vibe?

A short defence of gossip

Wicked King, Mozart: performance and posterity, Women detectives, Midwinter wood, Henry V, Venture Capital, Annihilation, Neverwhere, Enchanted Glass

How good is AI at literary criticism?

Late bloomers, Holmes' copyright shame, Guinness Magi, Unphilosophical living, Scott revival?, Context Collapse.

Is the Baroness in The Sound of Music a Nazi?

Austen saved me from social media

Seventieth anniversaries. 1955 was a very good year.

Reading Jane Austen

Jane Austen Schedule 2025

Tyler Cowen: Trump's DOGE team should read Shakespeare.