Afternoon all. What's on the agenda today? Slacking for all you holidaying students, no doubt. I'm in the office, reading furiously for the Anne paper I'm delivering next week, and wondering how I'm going to get to Cambridge during a rail strike. Not that I disagree with the brothers, of course.
Talking of reading, I've just finished Dennis Lehane's The Given Day. It's a thick, thrilling, complex book set in 1918-20 Boston, moving between the black crime underworld, Irish police corruption, baseball, prohibition, race and the leftwing political agitation of the time. It's politically complex, hugely violent, sometimes tender and always compelling. I might see Shutter Island now - Lehane wrote the novel.
Anyway - back to books with footnotes…
4 comments:
Good luck getting to Cambridge - if you make it here, the good news is that it's also very quiet with a depleted student population. Hopefully your conference will be packed out though, and the paper will go down a storm.
I often think of reading Dennis Lehane and then I think of someone else. Hmm. Perhaps I should have more stamina.
Thanks, LL. Cambridge without students sounds wonderful!
I wouldn't have picked up Lehane's book if it wasn't for the Irish and leftwing content - I'm not a crime or thriller reader at all. It's quality middlebrow: informed and pageturning. I'd rank it with Sittenfeld's American Wife.
Not all students are lazy slackers thankyou!
I have been in uni several times since the end of term trying to hunt down the books for an essay that isn't due until may, although as it's for critical theory it will probly take me that long to write it.
As for the train strikes you might fall lucky depending on what time you travel, they are striking for four hours in the mornnig and four hours in the evening during rush hour periods - that's if national rail enquiries are to be believed.
OK Lauren, I was only teasing! Hope the critical theory essay's going OK. You can always call in for a chat about it once we're back.
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