A Tale of Two Books: two reviewers; two opinions; "two species of novelist"

"There are two species of novelist: one writes as if the world is a known locale that requires dutiful reporting, the other as if the world has yet to be made. The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that 'this world is but canvas to our imaginations,' that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity. You close Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Middlemarch and Augie March, and the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before, an 'eternal and irrepressible freshness,' in Pound's apt phrase. His definition of literature is among the best we have: 'Language charged with meaning.' How charged was the last novel you read?"
— William Giraldi, in a New York Times review of Alix Ohlin's Inside and Signs and Wonders
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"No one can write books like Inside – a novel – and Signs and Wonders – a short-story collection – unless she grew up watching a lot of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen films (not a wild guess since Alix Ohlin is the daughter of Peter Ohlin, one of the world’s great authorities on Bergman). But Ohlin is so completely herself as a fiction writer that you don’t have to have seen any Bergman or Allen to get what she’s doing – all you need is a lot of smarts and a wry sense of humour."
— T.F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail
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All I Want Is a Room Somewhere...

From: Wikimedia Commons

"Agatha Christie was 48 years old in 1938, gaining fame and fortune from her prolific output of short stories and novels, one series starring the dandified Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, another centered on the underestimated spinster-sleuth Jane Marple. [...] Christie longed for a vacation refuge. That summer, she heard of a handsome Georgian manor house, built around 1792, going up for sale; it was set on 33 acres, 15 miles from her birthplace, the village of Torquay. For Christie, Greenway—reachable only by boat or down a narrow country lane one and a half miles from the nearest village of Galmpton—represented, as she wrote in her autobiography, 'the ideal house, a dream house.' " ( Smithsonian.com)  Read more...

"She may also have felt the pull of the garden and the boathouse, built on the spot where, it is said, Sir Walter Raleigh, smoking tobacco, had water thrown over him by a servant who thought he was on fire." (The Telegraph) Read more...

Where Henry Thoreau Penned Walden
— a more modest version of Greenway

From: The Statement

What it cost him:
• Board's: $8.03 (½, mostly shanty boards)
• Refuse shingles for roof and sides: $4.00
• One thousand old brick: $4.00
• Two casts of lime: $2.40.
• Hair: $0.31. (probably horsehair, which was used to strengthen plaster)
• Laths: $1.25
• Two second-hand windows with glass: $2.43
• Mantle-tree iron: $0.15
• Nails: $3.90
• Hinges and screws: $0.14
• Latch: $0.10
• Chalk: $0.01
• Transportation: $1.40
• In all: $28.12
(The Statement) Read more...

Bernard Shaw's Writing Hut

From: An Honest Architecture 

"Vanity Fair advertised a Lazy Susan in 1917, but it took the creative mind of Bernard Shaw to see it's potential when combined with a writing hut. The idea was ingenious for a few reasons." ( An Honest Architecture) Read more...

See also here... and here...