Call it “left-brain/right-brain” if you will. While my professional life has been spent mostly in the realms of medicine and science, my leisure time is significantly devoted to literature. My circumstances are now allowing me to pursue “a course of steady reading” through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and lacking a discussion outlet, I’ve decided to share my thoughts on what I read through this blog.
I recently regained access to a good academic library; while the growth of electronic literature has opened up a whole world of previously lost or obscure books. When I started this my idea was to unearth some of the 2nd- and 3rd-tier novelists from the 18th and 19th centuries, and see which of them may have unjustly fallen from the public eye – and which did so quite deservedly. However, somehow that evolved into a project looking at the chronological development of the novel, roughly between the years 1670 – 1750.
My reading and blogging, then, has two main threads. On one hand there is my “Chronobibliography” project; on the other, I am choosing novels at random from my completely untenable reading wishlist, with the boundaries set at 1751 and 1930. This thread I call “Reading Roulette”. A new subset of this is “Authors In Depth”, where I plan to look at the complete works of particular novelists, or as much as is extant. While in time I hope that this line of inquiry will bring to light some unjustly neglected novelists, quite likely the spotlight will fall upon novelists whose work is entertaining rather than high quality; even entertainingly bad.
So that’s the story. Please feel free to join in with comments, suggestions and even arguments!
I also write shorter reviews of my non-blog reading over at LibraryThing.
Meanwhile, the other side of my brain hangs out here: And You Call Yourself A Scientist!
— Liz
A Course Of Steady Reading 