Its view of history is bookishly linear, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

But she was warmly human, not bookishly aloof.

It seems bookishly conceptual, as if Oedipus had plucked off his reading glasses instead of gouging out his eyes.

He bookishly cloaks his disconnection in the ancient Greco-Roman philosophical ideal of self-sufficiency.

Neither bookishly wise nor cutting-edge hip, the boy is fiercely protective of his beleaguered mother, capable of violence in the good fight.

They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones, or pigs or slugs, or horses or anything you please.

With Fullerton, Wharton could be bookishly romantic ("I have found in Emerson (from Euripides, I suppose) just the phrase for you - & me.

A New Yorker interviewer, Robert M. Coates, was taken aback by an almost rococo derivative quality in Helen's discourse: She talks bookishly.

Its narrative slackens a bit just before the finish, as if the wind had died, and as much as I like its allusiveness, some passages are almost too bookishly cunning.

And how few, how few words, I thought, in passing, were needed; how little of the idyllic (and affectedly, bookishly, artificially idyllic too) had sufficed to turn a whole human life at once according to my will.

It was the exercise of my skill that carried me away; yet it was not merely sport .... I knew I was speaking stiffly, artificially, even bookishly, in fact, I could not speak except "like a book."

"Haroun" is a fantastical (and fantastically hopeful) novel, and a very funny one too, bookishly clever: one encounters, along with many outlandish characters, magical tale-spinning in the tradition of "The Arabian Nights," broad puns that nod to Joyce, and the anger coated in innocence perfected by Swift.