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From the reading desk
Reading notes, reviews and guides to the collection — written here, about books you can open here.
Empire, Settlement, and Self-Government: A Reading List for Independence Day
Eight books from the collection, read in a line that runs from the machinery of empire to the arguments a new nation makes for itself.
Henry Graham Dakyns: The Voice of Xenophon in English
A British translator who brought the histories, dialogues and treatises of the ancient Greek writer Xenophon into readable English.
An Introduction to Oscar Wilde
A guide to the Irish playwright, poet and essayist for readers meeting his work for the first time, with a suggestion on where to begin.
Charles Dickens: A First Reader's Guide
An introduction to the Victorian novelist and journalist, and where a newcomer to his shorter works can begin.
Kenilworth by Walter Scott: A Book Note
An orientation to Scott's Elizabethan novel of a hidden marriage, a scheming courtier, and the great festivities at Kenilworth Castle.
The Power of Concentration by William Walker Atkinson
A practical manual of mental exercises that treats concentration as a skill to be trained lesson by lesson.
Aucassin and Nicolete: A Reader's Note
Andrew Lang's rendering of a medieval song-story that alternates prose with verse, following two young lovers kept apart.
William Ernest Henley's Poems: A Reader's Orientation
A poetry collection whose long opening sequence is set inside a hospital, followed by songs, sketches, and a run of ballades.
The Amazing Interlude: A Wartime Romance With a Stage-Set Frame
Mary Roberts Rinehart follows a sheltered young woman who runs a blockade into the war zone and comes home changed, if unevenly told.
A Cathedral Courtship: A Romance Told in Two Voices
Kate Douglas Wiggin's slight, sharp epistolary romance follows a young American woman, her High Church aunt, and a persistent architect through England's cathedral towns.
Plato's Protagoras: A Sparring Match Disguised as Dinner Conversation
A dialogue that begins as a tutorial on virtue and devolves into competitive poetry criticism, revealing Socrates at his most evasive.
Timaeus: Plato's Cosmos, Filtered Through Jowett
Plato's account of the making of the world, wrapped in a long introduction that spends as much time explaining the book as the book spends on the cosmos.