Author: bpladek

A compilation of my reading blogs from 2018 (migrated from my old website). Tove Jansson It isn’t often that I get to add a writer to my pantheon of favorites, but this winter I did. Tove Jansson’s writing for adults is a wonder (and I only say “writing for adults” because I’m still working my…

This post comes out of a facebook question posed by some humanists from my PhD-granting institution about leisure reading. The question: “Do you read for pleasure, and if so, why and how?” And the question-behind-the-question: “How do you continue to read for fun when your job is reading? And what happens if you feel like…

I had originally planned this post as a little discussion of an allusion I recently discovered in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novel The Farthest Shore to Rilke’s tenth Duino Elegy. But as I re-read the novel’s penultimate chapter where the allusion begins, I realized the post was going to have to be much longer. Because in addition…