I immediately feel bad that I couldn’t help thinking about Haruki Murakami while listening to this one. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable truth that while reading a contemporary Japanese writer, of thinking of the most famous Japanese writer. But in the last year I’ve read a handful of other Japanese writers, so I do feel better about it. But the thing is, this is definitely similar to Murakami. It’s a small novel about domestic spaces, particularly a small set of houses that “share” a cat who […]
Zombie fungus?
Another short and more or less forgettable book I listened to while moving boxes and cleaning floors. I picked this one up because it showed up on a list of 50 Horror Writers who aren’t Stephen King or something like that. I like Stephen King a lot and so I figured, sure I will read more horror. And I was also review some more here soon. Maybe I don’t like Horror so much as I like Stephen King. Anyway, I also generally like Walter Mosley, […]
Let’s tell the truth to people. When people ask, ‘How are you?’ have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avaoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don’t want to know about yours.
This wasn’t planned but I bet somewhere deep in my subconscious I knew I was going to do this. The last time I moved I recall listening to about three Maya Angelou books in a row on audiobook while sorting, cleaning, and getting through my move. I just moved this weekend and listened to this one. She reads her books and her voice is so encouraging and pleasant, and she has such a bright outlook on even the darkest of subjects. This book is kind […]
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings.
I suppose it’s all the rage to write novels and memoirs describing and narrating one’s own descent into madness. I have talked before how I generally think that novels that deal with insanity are usually pretty bad and offensive because they’re artless and silly a lot of times. Memoirs are 50/50. In some cases the writing is really good, but the understanding is not. Or in some cases, neither is particularly good. The writing for this memoir is perfectly good, but the analysis is so […]
And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer’s voice is a singular one, solitary.
If I were to rate this book, I would give it two stars. As far as the writing goes, it’s more or less fine. It’s amatuerish because of the nature of the project. Jhumpa Lahiri is writing in Italian, a language she’s learned late in life and exploring as a kind of project, and this is the translation of a speech given at a conference. It reads like someone giving a speech in a language that they learned late in life. It’s limited in its […]
I’m following the whole Sparsholt affair scientifically
I am really glad I went into this novel with no real knowledge of the plot. It made a few of the turns more interesting, and one quite devastating…even though it turned out I was wrong. There are no twists here, though, as happens in life. This novel is on the tail end (maybe) of a renewed interest in WWII, especially the RAF and the Blitz. And this novel picks up right at the beginning, at Oxford, during the Blitz. We begin with the journal […]
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