I guess to get it out of the way: I did struggle with deciding to read this book at first because of the title. I am not squeamish of the title in terms of it being a little close to Hitler’s book, because the author is being a little tongue in cheek about the whole thing. It was more so that I was worried that there would a kind of self-important grandiosity about the whole thing. And there is a little, but it’s embedded in […]
Mother, mother
The Scapegoat – Mary Lee Settle This is the fourth book in the Beaulah Quinet, Mary Lee Settle’s history of West Virginia through the lens of conflicts ranging from the ousting of a Puritan partisan in the English Civil War (leading to immigration to America) to the settling and drawing of land parcels in the 18th century to a novel I haven’t read yet in the 1840s to this coal mining dispute in 1912 and finally to more or less contemporary times. Following one family, in […]
A Man, A Van, Japan: Two Reviews
The Van; Some Prefer Nettles by Roddy Doyle; Junichiro Tanizaki
The Van – Roddy Doyle – 4/5 Stars This is the third book of the Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle. The previous books are The Commitments and The Snapper. All three take place in a lower class neighborhood in Dublin, Ireland in the 1980s and spiral around various members of the Rabbitte family, a family who along with being desperately poor and loving, seem to have an endless number of kids coming and going. And like the difference between The Commitments and The Snapper, it’s […]
A Classic and a Classic and a Classic
The Picture of Dorian Gray – 5/5 Stars I wasn’t sure I was going to listen to this audiobook or not. I like the era (love Sherlock Holmes) and I’ve read a handful of Oscar Wilde plays, but never his fiction. Luckily, Simon Prebble is a great reader (he narrated The Moonstone earlier this year for me and I like that a lot), and it turns out this is a great novel. It’s interesting because I have a huge schema for what I thought this […]
Tales and Tales
I wrote a review earlier in the year for one novella out of this collection ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” since that was being made into a movie and I wanted to get ahead of the game. But then I never saw that movie, so who knows. Anyway, here’s the rest of the collection. There’s a bunch of longish stories in this book and a handful of much shorter ones. The title story is about 120 pages long and the shortest is like nine, so there’s […]
A rehash and a rehash
Lost City of Z – 3/5 stars This promised a lot more than it delivered I felt like. This happened for a few different reasons. One, I think it’s a nearly impossible task to write a satisfyingly concluding recounting of a set of explorations that disappeared unless you 100% figure out what happened and find direct evidence, and despite whatever kind of overly positive spin at the end, I just don’t think it was able to do so. Two, not only was most of this […]
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