Shakespeare Will Not Make Us Better, And

Rebecca Mead's My Life In Middlemarch Is A Wise, Humane, And Delightful Study Of What Some Regard As The Best Novel In English. Mead Has Discovered An Original And Highly Personal Way To Make Herself An Inhabitant Both Of The Book And Of George Eliot's Imaginary City. Though I Have Read And Taught The Book These Many Years I Find Myself Desiring To Go Back To It After Reading Rebecca Mead's Work.

I Am Not Unique In My Elegiac Sadness At Watching Reading Die, In The Era That Celebrates Stephen King And J.k. Rowling Rather Than Charles Dickens And Lewis Carroll.

You Know, I Don't Want To Be Offensive. But 'infinite Jest' [regarded By Many As Wallace's Masterpiece] Is Just Awful. It Seems Ridiculous To Have To Say It. He Can't Think, He Can't Write. There's No Discernible Talent.

Unless You Have Read And Absorbed The Best That Can Be Read And Absorbed, You Will Not Think Clearly Or Well.

I Would Say That There Is No Future For Literary Studies As Such In The United States.