Binti So something that I really liked about this novella is that there is almost no world building. This will come up in another review I will be writing later too. Too often, a new inventive world is described in a too detailed way where simply telling the story and setting up what we need to know as we go will be much much better, and there’s a more satisfying story that way. And so this one does. The only real issue I have with […]
I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
This is a collection of three short stories from Melville that I listened to last night. I was telling a colleague at school how seniors in the second semester remind me so much of Bartleby that I felt like I should reread and revisit the story, as it’s been almost ten years since I last saw it. High school seniors in their final semester are often energetic and intense and so ready for the next steps. I know I was (not by my own virtues […]
And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person’s eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors.
To account for this novel, you have to think through how the title and the keyword “insignificance” play out here. It’s a short novel, and it’s a novel of light touches. The structure is not all that dissimilar from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with expats living in a foreign land being checked in upon by the author as narrator. Here, we have a similar story…a various sort of people living in Paris in more or less contemporary times. They are friends, they talk about life, […]
Well, science and religion are not competitors, they’re two different languages trying to tell the same story. There’s room in this world for both.
Sometimes Dan Brown books and especially Robert Langdon as a character take credit for kind of obvious and not all that profound wisdom and philosophy. For example, there’s a part in this book where a character says a thing about evolution in a specific and creative way. Then, Dan Brown has Robert Langdon laugh at and admire how clever the saying was. That’s not how novels work dude! Don’t say something (not all that) clever and then have a character give you credit for it. […]
What the hell is that?
Crota! Crota! So this is a horror novel that reads like a straight-to-video supernatural/creature feature movie. When I was a kid my dad used to rent procedural crime movies from Kroger all the time. One he would get every so often, watching and rewatching, was the Lou Diamond Phillips and Val Kilmer movie Thunderheart. This is book is like a blend of that and the movie Ravenous and a more monstery book. There’s a monster here. There’s a monster here and it’s killing people. It’s big red-headed […]
The lights of the little highway town ahead spread with their approach and then scattered like flushed prey as they entered its limits. Under the filling-station sheds, swirling insects clouded the naked bulbs.
This novel was published in 1937, and it feels like it. In part, I would say that like a lot of semi-early versions of a genre, the rawness and the rough around the edges quality of a novel is such a limiting factor and you can feel it. I spoke in an earlier review how the Alfred Bester novel The Stars My Destination was NOT plagued with this kind of sense of adherence to genre and roughness. This one however is, with some differences at times. […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 331
- 332
- 333
- 334
- 335
- …
- 402
- Next Page »