Magnificent Octopus

I MOOC too much. I'm currently enrolled in only one online class, but the coursework is a little heavy. I'm not even convinced tha...

"No one ever talks to anyone in our family, we just exchange brilliances." A Suitable Boy , by Vikram Seth, is a terrific book, wi...

It wasn't long ago that the Arkanarian court was one of the most educated in the empire. There had been scientists at court, most of who...

Have you ever "perused" the dictionary? pe·ruse /pəˈro͞oz/ verb : formal read (something), typically in a thorough or careful wa...

And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a...

I sat on the bench by the willows and ate my honey bun and read Triton . There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there ...

Helena develops highly elaborate scenarios in her play. This has been true forever. For example, she keeps a notebook of all her Playmobil c...

I just started reading Hard to Be a God , by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, freshly available in a new English translation. Written in 1964,...

We went down the hill to the bookshop, sort of automatically, as if that's the way all our feet wanted to turn. I said that to them. ...

Alphonse leaned in and kissed me. It was a huge kiss that covered my whole mouth. I didn't know that kissing could make you feel so afra...

This has been a most puzzling book. Sentence by sentence it's absolutely gorgeous, but I have trouble making sense of it. On Being Blu...

Maria Popova presents a lovely overview of Leo Buscaglia's ideas — she focuses primarily on the topics of education and labeling — as p...

There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren't nearly enough of them; the second is that t...

Resurrection , by Wolf Haas, is a charming little crime novel. That is, there's very little crime in it, it just zips along from taxicab...

He tried smiling roguishly into the side mirror. What a tragedy. Like a German pretending to find Polish humour funny. Entanglement , by Zyg...

"I don't know if you have ever been in love. Really and truly. If you have, you're a lucky man, If not, I envy you like the dev...

Today's episode of Spark on CBC Radio focused on the future of reading in the internet age . How, generally, the rhythm of our lives and...

Although this blog was not named for the cephalopod , I have a certain fascination with these creatures. I would be remiss not to share this...

Łazienki Park I wonder what it would be like, thought Szacki, if I were to park in the courtyard and go up to the flat on the second floo...

Matthew Carter on designing typefaces that compensate for technology, from the phenomenon of inkspread to screen resolution.