John Baker’s Blog

William Kowalski at the Globe & Mail makes the case for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby:
Gatsby the man is a complete fiction, as he admits to narrator Nick Carraway: Just as the United States was carved from the wilderness, he fashioned himself an identity as a wealthy, Oxford-educated gentleman, sustaining it through sheer determination and bravado - that [...]

At the Times Online Ben Macintyre considers the art of a good book title
The words that matter most in any book, of course, are neither at the beginning nor the end, but on the front cover. Would great books have become great books had they been called something else? In 1924, a young writer sent [...]

1. Why do you blog?
I’ve always had life journals, starting with a small five-year red diary when I was about ten years old. (I still have it too.) Then notebooks of various types, advancing to typed pages in looseleaf binders. Naturally, with the advent of online journaling, I began a blog. Progess, I suppose. But [...]

The miraculous yield of 1922.
The year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Rilke’s Dueno Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus(written in three days). Of Brecht’s first play, Baal, Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Virginia Wolfe’s Jacob’s Room, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christy, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned Galsworthy’s The [...]