Word: reader
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Beyond its entertainment value, the book offers a remarkable glimpse into the personal lives of Arab multitudes, Arab attitudes toward justice, money and women become apparent as one microcosm of society applies its energies to Omar's dilemma. Thanks to the author's effortless narrative, the reader hurtles through an exotic world, not realizing until the end that he has been taken on a fascinating trip through the Arab mind...
...creation." Wilson's scrutiny of the fierce personal drive that transformed an anonymous, victimized lad into the inimitable Boz opens the way to a shrewd, wide-ranging analysis of Dickens' life and work. The result is the best all-round book on the subject for the general reader in years. Absorbing, gracefully written, freshly thought out, it is, in addition, that rare hybrid, a coffee-table book with both brains and beauty. The glossy pages are strewn with well-selected (though skimpily captioned) illustrations that vividly reflect the squalor and especially the sentiment of 19th century England...
Nowhere does Dickens seem more modern than in his treatment of London. He prowled its streets at night so much during his lifetime that he found it hard to write without the inspiration of his "magic lantern," as he called the city. When he pulled the reader along, says Wilson, he brought the first "cinematic mobility" to the English novel: long tracking shots, like Oliver Twist's escapades in grimy alleys, where the scenes flash by like some satanic carnival; wide panoramas, like the scene in the brickyard in Dombey and Son, where the city lies on the horizon...
...singer, gyrate your crotch and you're a dancer, take off your clothes and you're an actor, dump a ton of cement on the floor and you're a sculptor. Doing your own thing is all right for a genius. But, dear reader, you are not a genius. Neither am I. We need rules to build on. If you do something good today, it is bound to be modern...
This kind of genius, and that is what it is, comes to us so rarely that when it does, it defies all our expectations, all our pretentious preconceptions, all our prejudices. Elizabeth Bishop caters to no one, except to the careful reader. Her poems are not easy, and they make no attempt to be popular. I myself find them so vivid, so intensely compressed that I can only read a little at a time. But Miss Bishop's poems are not consciously difficult by any means; they are almost too clear to look at. She is the least esoteric...