The Charlock’s Shade is a blog I’ve had on my sidebar for ages and which I visit regularly. In appearance, content and feel, it’s quite unlike any other blog I know. It’s generally dedicated to literature and the arts, with a concentration on English literature and English authors and personalities. But other things also get a look-in from time to time. Recently there have been a couple of cricket posts, and that has to be good.
Charlock is an eccentric mix, with an Eng lit flavour. It’s full of items on literary figures about whom you may have heard but not necessarily know all that much: J.F. Powers and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example. Down one side of the front page there are very short reviews of the sort of books that are often overlooked by literary publications taken up with the new and the fashionable. Two essays – on Aldous Huxley and Mark Twain – caught my eye. These are writers who are well-known without perhaps being as well-read as they used to be, and it’s good to have a reminder of their continuing worth. The site guides you to interesting reviews, such as the one about Nathaniel Hawthorne, which throws light on his most famous work: The Scarlet Letter. There are also amusing informational odds and ends. Did you know that Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is a bestseller in the Sudan?
It’s a blog for the intellectually curious, those unafraid of books written a long time ago. Enoch Soames, yer ‘main man’ at The Charlock, doesn’t care how recent an author is, as long as he or she has something interesting to say. So, see, I’m recommending it to you.