I didn’t like this novel so much so that I took the trilogy edition of it and put it in the Little Free Library this morning. I hope someone does like it, but I thought it was not good. It’s not surprising then that I loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn so much, because if we’re read a narration of growing up in New York City that’s the one to read. In this one, though, we get an ok story….ne’er do well, petty crimes, games of […]
Wise Blood
I am pretty sure that re-reading this about 15 years after first reading it, I definitely thought I understood it more than I definitely actually understood it. This novel is a few things: Southern, dark, crass, and Religious. Flannery O’Connor does not like fakers. Not at all. There’s obviously the Yeats quote that gets thrown around a lot about…well, here: The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Well ok, but there are no best. Flannery O’Connor’s writing does not […]
The Tempest meets Blade Runner and also not.
This is a novel fundamentally concerned with “total representation.” Representation is such a squelchy topic, especially in literature, because like everything else in art, life, physics, and pretty much everything else, there is a gap between reality and representation of reality. In this novel, which is a kind of futuristic steampunk, a sort of what if a steampunk past made it to the future. Also, it’s sort of like what if there’s a kind of lateral time-line. So think Oryx and Crake, but written by […]
Having finally turned her attention to Helga Crane, Fortune now seemed determined to smile
This one has sort of always eluded me. It was on my best professor’s syllabus for one of the few of her classes I didn’t take, and even when I was sitting down to do Comps lists, I chose Passing instead. But this book is great. I can’t say I am much of an expert in Black womanhood (most definitely can’t) but this book seems to contain a set of key issues and experiences that go along with it and resonate with my other reading. Helga […]
I am the only person on the place who is willing to underwrite, with something more than tolerance, the presence of the peafowl.
As with everything else she wrote, there isn’t enough of it. This short collection of essays covers a variety of topics mostly about writing, religion, The South, but also, and delightfully, peafowl. Here’s a great snippet: “Over the years their attitude toward me has not grown more generous. If I appear with food, they condescend, when no other way can be found, to eat it from my hand; if I appear without food, I am just another object. If I refer to them as ‘my’ […]
Tomorrow all his youth, his Russia, was coming back to him again.
Something has been lost in the inter-connectivity of the modern world. The distances that used to separate us physically, created emotional gulfs that also separated us. One of the strongest themes in Lonesome Dove is how the actual physical size and landscape of the American West created this kind of emotional distance. Even yesterday as my girlfriend and I were having an unofficial anniversary dinner, we got on the topic of the weeks and months leading up to our meeting three years ago. This isn’t an […]
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