Reviews of Contemporary Literature (Novel Readings)

About the Author

Rohan Maitzen

I am an English professor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I blog at Novel Readings. More information about me can be found at my home page.

About This Index

I began blogging at Novel Readings in January, 2007. This index page provides a guide to the majority of the substantive reviews and commentaries posted there. The usual format of a blog, always presenting the most recent content first, implies (misleadingly, in my view) that older content becomes less relevant and interesting as it recedes into the archives. Searching by 'label,' though it gathers related content, similarly enforces the primacy of the latest installment--even though the most recent post most likely builds on a chain of thoughts and references developed over time and thus best followed in chronological order.

Because I have conceived of Novel Readings not (or not just) as a news feed on my latest reading, teaching or thinking, but also as a repository of ideas and readings, I hope here to off-set this bias towards the recent by organizing the content of the blog according to a different principle or image: as an interrelated set of constantly evolving or expanding chapters. Each 'chapter' heading is followed by a chronological series of links to posts at Novel Readings, then--or, on occasion, to posts at The Valve, where I have been a contributor since March 2008. I hope that by offering this alternative approach to navigating the blog that I can enhance its usefulness, not only to myself by making it easier to locate and track the unfolding of ideas I'm not finished with yet, but also to visitors. To paraphrase a famous philosopher, Novel Readings (like every blog) will not therefore have been, (nor will it ever be) a book--but it is something like one, a malleable, unstable, diffuse one, in ways that this Index helps display.

Index to Novel Readings‎ > ‎

Reviews of Contemporary Literature

Zadie Smith, White Teeth (January 18, 2007); On Beauty (April 16, 2007)

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (May 23, 2007)

Vikram Seth, An Equal Music (June 5, 2007)

Joanna Trollope, A Village Affair (June 15, 2007)

Carol Shields, Unless (July 9, 2007)

Monica Ali, Brick Lane (July 28, 2007)

Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic (January 28, 2008)

Olivia Manning, The Fortunes of War (May 10, 2008)

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (July 10, 2008)

Inger Ashe Wolf, The Calling (September 1, 2008)

Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park; Jennifer Chiaverini, The Quilter's Apprentice (October 29, 2008)

Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk (February 14, 2009)

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (April 5, 2009)

Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran (May 31, 2009)

Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (June 7, 2009)

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero (June 7, 2009)

Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (July 3, 2009)

Moral Tourism (Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil) (July 26, 2009)

Ian Colford, Evidence (August 15, 2009)

David Lodge, Deaf Sentence; Penelope Lively, Cleopatra's Sister (August 24, 2009)

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (August 28, 2009)