Summer Reading

Dear Woolf-Packers—


I hope you are all having a great summer! I certainly am. Just got back from the 20th annual international conference on Virginia Woolf. If you want some gossip about what Woolf scholars are doing, and pictures of them, you might be interested in Paula Maggio’s blog: http://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/ Vara Neverow has posted a blog about the conference as well: http://vneverow.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/just-back-from-the-woolf-conference-in-kentucky/

I write also to tell you about a book I recently really enjoyed reading which I wanted to recommend to you if you are looking around for something not too heavy but thought-provoking to read. It’s PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST BY Jonah Lehrer. It’s about how artists have discovered things about the structure of the human mind and perceptions that scientists are only now beginning to confirm. Here's the  Amazon Link
He starts out with a chapter on Walt Whitman and the mind/body connection; then moves on the George Eliot and Darwin, covering most of the senses with chapters on taste and the father of French cooking, sight and Cezanne, and music and Stravinsky . The chapter on Proust is about memory of course, and the book ends with language and Gertrude Stein and consciousness and Virginia Woolf. Aside from just being interesting to anyone who is a thinking human, the book also ends up being quite a refreshing introduction to a lot of the basic ideas of modernism, and I think would serve as a good background to reading Woolf in the fall.

Hope you all are looking forward to the seminar as much as I am.

See you in August.