Today’s #AuthorAlmanac entry: Evelyn Waugh
“the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”
Today marks sixty years since Waugh’s death.
It’s a reminder, perhaps, of how unstable the idea of ‘the present’ really is. What once felt immediate,
reminds us that even perfect rules leave room for doubt and misinterpretation. Maybe that’s a good thing. But maybe not.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Isaac Asimov
“if Byerley follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man.”
Asimov’s highly influential Three Laws of Robotics offer a neat ethical framework - at least on paper.
They describe a kind of goodness we might aspire to.
returns, not diminished but amplified, each time it speaks.
Reading Angelou reminds us that meaning is not only found in what is said, but in how it is said, how often, and who is able to say it.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Maya Angelou
“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies…
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
Angelou’s poetry is often read as defiance. I think what gives it its force is not volume or anger. It is control.
In 'Still I Rise' (1978), the speaker does
always in the process of revising, whether we mean to or not. And then we have to contend, too, with the forces who want to influence that process.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Milan Kundera
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Kundera’s fiction returns again and again to a disquieting idea - that who we are is inseparable from what we remember. And what we have forgotten, whether willingly or not.
Donne's religion is urgent, disruptive, almost violent: a desire not simply to believe, but to be remade.
Reading Donne is not to find answers, but to encounter a mind in the act of wrestling with itself.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: John Donne
“Batter my heart, three-person’d God…”
Donne is a poet of contradiction: a man pummelled and shaped by opposing forces, never quite at rest within himself. His work moves from the wit and sensuality of his early poetry to the intense, often uncomfortable
what arrives, but what takes hold.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Kiran Millwood Hargrave
“…she has taken to wearing her faith like armour, wielding her piousness like a blade.”
Hargrave often draws on folklore and history, shaping them into narratives that explore how communities form and how they fracture under pressure.
Woolf’s genius lies in showing that what matters is not simply what happens, but how it is experienced: how meaning is made in the act of observing.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Virginia Woolf
“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Woolf begins with an ordinary decision - a small act, easily overlooked - and from it unfolds an entire world of thought, memory, and feeling. In Mrs Dalloway (1925), the movement is not
often oblivious to what we're doing.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Or is it something you do?”
Ellis’s novel forces us to consider whether evil is a monstrous identity we recognise easily, or something far more ordinary, hidden behind the routines and rituals of everyday life.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
#AuthorAlmanac
Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Bret Easton Ellis
In American Psycho (1991), Ellis asks a deeply uncomfortable question about identity and morality.
Patrick Bateman moves through a world of immaculate surfaces: designer suits, business cards, restaurant reservations, brand names recited like the liturgy
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Gabriel García Márquez
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, time does not behave as we expect. Generations repeat names, histories echo earlier mistakes, and the past never quite settles into the past.
“Time was not passing… it was turning in a circle.”
Márquez understood
rarely end when the moment passes. They travel with us. Across this week’s Almanac - with Machen’s hidden depths, Ellison’s invisibility, Steinbeck’s insistence on choice - Hosseini reminds us that truth withheld reshapes the world.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Khaled Hosseini.
In 'The Kite Runner', a single act of betrayal echoes across decades. Hosseini writes about lies not as clever evasions, but as fractures. Moments that alter the course a life follows.
When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. More
Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Arthur Machen.
The sublime is the moment when scale unsettles certainty. When mountain or storm reminds us that the world is larger, older, less manageable than we would like to believe. Perspective can be terrifying as a reality-check.
For Wordsworth, that shock before
Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Ralph Ellison.
An almanac can be a list of anniversaries … or it can be a conversation.
The more entries you read, and the more you join the dots across genre, era, and voice, the clearer certain themes become. Power. Visibility. Individuality. Moral choices.
Ellison’s
when consumption is our only law?
Is ‘might is right’ unavoidable?
Reading him sharpens our sense of scale, and it reminds us that even in enormous systems, individual choices still matter. Happy 60th birthday, Philip Reeve.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: Philip Reeve.
In Mortal Engines, cities roam a ruined earth, devouring one another in the name of survival. Reeve calls it ‘Municipal Darwinism’. It’s a world of frightening scarcity, where progress feeds on the weak.
But his stories rarely belong to the powerful. They
slowly. Tenacity mattered as much as talent. Reading him reminds us of the people, lives, and choices we often overlook.
Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.
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Today’s #AuthorAlmanac: John Steinbeck.
Steinbeck’s work insists on the dignity of the individual and the reality of choice. His protagonists are often ordinary people: fruit pickers, ranch hands, drifters. The kind of lives he encountered growing up and working in California’s agricultural
human will pushes beyond its allotted bounds.
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