Ebook: Reading style: a life in sentences

A professor, critic, and insatiable reader, Jenny Davidson investigates the passions that drive us to fall in love with certain sentences over others and the larger implications of our relationship with writing style. At once playful and serious, immersive and analytic, her memoir/critique shows how style elicits particular kinds of moral judgments and subjective preferences, which turn reading into a highly personal and political act. Melding her experiences as reader and critic, Davidson opens new vistas onto works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Pynchon; adds r.;The Glimmer Factor: Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels -- Lord Leighton, Liberace, and the Advantages Of Bad Writing: Helen Dewitt, Harry Stephen Keeler, Lionel Shriver, George Eliot -- Mouthy Pleasures and the Problem Of Momentum: Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem -- The Acoustical Elegance of Aphorism: Kafka, Fielding, Austen, Flaubert -- Tempo, Repetition, and a Taxonomy Of Pacing: Peter Temple, Neil Gaiman, A.L. Kennedy, Edward P. Jones -- Late Style: The Golden Bowl and Swann's Way -- Disordered Sentences: Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante -- Details That Linger and the Charm Of Voluntary Reading: George Pelecanos, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon -- The Ideal Bookshelf: the Rings of Saturn and the Line Of Beauty -- The Bind of Literature and the Bind of Life: Voices From Chernobyl, Thomas Bernhard, Karl Ove Knausgaard.