I guess I will find out, not today, but later in the year whether or not this book becomes a series for me. This is the same situation that always happens with any kind series, but here we are again. In this small novella (again, I am not so sure why this isn’t just the start of a novel that becomes published later, but novellas are big right now in genre fiction), we have a survey mission commissioned by a corporate entity on a foreign […]
Subscribers to a library borrowed for a modest fee one after another book of a kind sometimes called by publishers *library fiction*.
Gerald Murnane is an author I don’t really know anything about. He’s close to 80, Australian, and is more or less seen as the Australia’s Great Hope for another Nobel Prize winner (step aside Peter Carey). I want to say I know more about him after reading this novel, which feels like it could be a roman a clef. But I get the distinct sense, that while Murnane and his unnamed narrator do share some similarities, these connections cannot be relied upon. If there’s a […]
Family life is out.
I don’t know if Jonathan Baumbach is a good person. I do know that his character in “The Squid and the Whale” is one of the most convincing, horrifying, and fully realized portrayals of a kind of dad that I have ever seen. He confirms everything I would have thought about every contemporary writer who has more talent than success (at least in their own minds). I also never knew if he was any good as a writer. His kind of work is the kind […]
One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally.
This book came across my radar years ago from the MLA’s Top 100 (English Language) Books. I had never heard of it, thought it sounded interesting, and was intrigued by the title. Years passed and I finally found a copy of it in a Little Free Library. It’s a farcical love story taking place at Oxford in about 1900. The novel and story being told remind me how weird books written between 1895 and 1915 really are. That weird caught-between space in time prewar and […]
Women always think you need a man, you need a father, as if they’d be the slightest use. Men are a dead weight, they’re clumsy and maladjusted.
This is a very funny and weird and good play completely ruined by Roman Polanski’s adapting it. The casting was even great…Jodie Foster, John C Reilly, Kate Winslet, and Christoph Waltz….that’s five Oscars right there, plus Roman Polanski adding another. So anyway! I was mad because I otherwise would have watched it, but knowing that I would have been too distracted by the associations I couldn’t. So I read it. In the play, two sets of parents living in New York are meeting after a […]
Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down… I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine.
I picked this book up because it has an interesting title, was small, and was on David Bowie’s booklist that was published soon after his death. This is a book about coming to terms with living a kind of freeform and incorporeal life. And I couldn’t care less about it. I won’t rate it, because it might be good and might connect with others, but since I am not part of that audience, I couldn’t get much out of it, and it doesn’t make any […]
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