I like fantasy novels more or less, but I find them to be rather hard to review. I think that while on the one hand, I enjoy them and even respect them, I don’t always find myself with much in the way of salient topics to discuss. So for this one, it’s more or less the case. I enjoyed it. I did take my a long time between the first in the series and this one, because I listened to that in audiobook form. And […]
I made what can only have been a few rather idiotic observations about the bricks.
I will say this ahead of time….I tend to find Sarah Waters’s novels to be pretty good in general, if a little either overpromised or underwhelming. And this one is more or less the same. The setup is very good for a lot of reasons. The story is Dr Faraday, a country doctor who sees to a small community also stops in at the local estate, with which he shares a small history–his mother was once on the staff there. The family is left to […]
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
I don’t think I plan on reading “Norse Mythology” by Neil Gaiman. I am sure it is perfectly good, but for lots of reasons, this book being one of them, I feel like I have a lot of and plenty of experience reading about the Norse people and their myths. For one, I recently replayed “Age of Mythology” and saw “Thor: Ragnarok” so I am good. Oh, and you should be clear that this book is not related. This book is mostly the telling of […]
I’m sick of my own romanticism!
This is a strange book because at his stage in the game…that is Western society and especially Western literature, the kinds of personal and sexual discoveries and intimate details are not exactly shocking anymore. Their strength in this memoir is not their shocking nature, at all of course, but that’s part of the appeal. Instead, there’s a historical moment and fascination in this book. On the one hand, this book really does represent someone’s real earnest desire to be sexual consumed in a love affair, […]
There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?
There’s not much comfort offered in reading this novel. It’s a clear articulation of a teacher’s sexual exploitation of a middle school boy. The encounters are described in pretty stark terms, so there’s not a lot of room for interpretation or nuance. Oh, but it’s written as a sexually liberating affair novel. So there’s that. The obvious parallels for this novel are Notes on a Scandal in which a teacher sort of “finds” herself involved in a sexual relationship with boy at her school and […]
After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.
This one won’t cheer you up. I learned about a kind of hidden history I had no idea about from this book. For one, this book does give voice to a set of experiences that are by their very nature voiceless. But two, this story involves a set of events that do not get discussed pretty much ever in the West and especially not right now during the winter Olympics. I found out that South Korea experienced a series of coups in the 60s and […]
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