HeyJaredIn pursuit of the past
Exploring the relationship between fiction and history: my notes on slow reads of historical fiction (starting with Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy) & what I'm learning as a self-taught student of literature, focusing on craft + historical context.
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- Sep 13, 2026
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- Jul 22, 2026
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Reading Like a Writer (opens the original)
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“We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening, is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, in which we are paying attention to whatever each word or phrase is transmitting.”What a difference it makes to pick up a book at the right moment! I first paged through Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer last year, during a period of illness where my brain was scrambled by post-surgery exhaustion an
A Place of Greater Safety: “embellishments to the truth” (opens the original)
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I wrote this as a (very late) follow-up to Simon Haisell’s 2025 slow read of A Place of Greater Safety, so it contains references from throughout the book, & may contain spoilers…“You have to employ some fantasy to keep brute reality at bay.”This post follows on from my earlier one about the complex relationship between history and imagination in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety:Mantel’s navigation of
Six ways of looking at a book (opens the original)
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As a first step in my tentative self-study project on Literature in the World, I decided to orient myself and shore up my confidence by looking through some introductory literature textbooks1.In response, I’ve been reflecting on different approaches to reading: ones I’ve used in the past, ones I’m learning more about, and particularly ones I’d like to use to develop my reading in future:Fast: Rapidly decoding a t
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