Fun Reading: Malazan!

This is the third book in a ten-book series.
Steven Erikson's Memories of Ice.
Erikson's heroic fantasy is real literature, invoking and breaking the stale cliches of the genre, enlivening character and plot with insight, wit, humor, and compassion, pulling and pushing his readers to the brink of expectation and trauma, again and again.

Very fine writing.





Whiskeyjack, man.  Really?

Not as Obvious as It Ought to Be

Teach the book on its merits, not on its laurels.

(And by book, I mean anything.  I mean specific books first, of course, the ones by Homer and Melville and Austen and Shakespeare and whomever is popular in the moment, but I certainly mean anything also.)

English Literature: 1660-1850

Here are the specific books I'm ordering for the survey course I'll be teaching next term.

Stanley Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

Also, I've a rather full Reader of plays, stories, excerpts from novels, poems, and essays: Restoration drama and poetry; Richardson's Pamela (in part); the Graveyard/Elegy school; "A Modest Proposal"; among others.  In addition, I tend to supplement the assigned material with impromptu handouts on an almost weekly basis.

Dover Thrift editions too.