This is a strange book to me because on the one hand I know that, while it’s not entirely a new foray into a newish genre, it’s something of an early effort for Ursula K Le Guin, but it’s not a profound extension of the genre, and in fact, it’s even a solidly good novel. It’s good, and it’s fine. But it’s also an oddly out of balance book. It’s short. It feels short when you look at it and hold it, but it also […]
I really liked it, until I didn’t.
So this novel has a lot going for it. I think the initial premise is really good. I think a lot about what would/will happen when there’s a huge environmental or financial crash that topples the total authority of governments to the point that there are corporate enclaves we swear fealty to. I personally will select Amazon because they’re clearly going to be the biggest, have the best supply chains, and I very honestly have thought about what it might mean to live on an […]
A bevy of Education Books 2
Holding on to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. There’s nothing wrong with this book, in fact there’s a lot right with it. I wanted something different from what I got, hoping for something less (here’s all the things to know, and something more specific). So in a lot of ways, this book is too general for what I wanted from it. It focuses a few key principles for literacy and teaching. I think in general most of what he presents here is […]
Same as it ever was
These are three short novels written by the (mostly) playwright Patrick Hamilton in the early 1930s about his time as a youngish not quite writer making all the same mistakes we all made. He is best know for Rope and Gaslight which became movies. The Midnight Bell This first novel takes its name from the the name of the pub which is the center of all three novels. We meet Bob, the beloved half-Irish/half-American bartender who’s going to be a writer some day. For now, he’s saving up […]
Just some nice books.
I Feel Bad about My Neck The charm of this book lies in the fact that the audiobook was read by Nora Ephron. I listened to the whole thing on a walk. This is a short collection of essays about aging in various kinds of ways, whether that means the effects on aging on your body or the simply just the passing of time. So those two themes, along with a few others, sort of permeate this whole collection. The essays include the frustration of […]
A fantastic farrago of evil
This book has some serious payoff at the end, and of course a wonderful fake index that clarifies and makes everything right. If you don’t know this one, this is a novel in the form of an academic annotation of a long poem. The poem itself is a 1000 (technically 999) line poem about a pastoral and academic life, love and marriage, childhood, parenting, death. Like what most poems are about, with a kind of erudition and educated set of allusions. The notes on this […]
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