You should read this book if you really liked Wolf Hall but thought, man, that should have been longer and more complex. This book is a trip though. It’s a 750 page novel about the French Revolution, told from a kind of both eagle-eye perspective and from a really getting into the muck and blood, kind of perspective. Told through long vignettes, long scenes of dialog, court-room records, historical transcripts, omniscient narration, first-person narration, and other weird snippets, and with a very wry tone, this novel […]
High School Seniors read Hamlet for you.
I don’t know if you like teenagers, but I do. They’re great; they’re terrible. But I re-read Hamlet for about the 15th time with my AP students and instead of reviewing what I thought about it for the 15th time, here’s what they said about it. The best day of class was when we talked about the “get thee to a nunnery” scene and one of my students called Hamlet a “fuck boy”. I asked them to do a 25-50 word capsule review or an […]
How to feel Bad about the World and Yourself!
Sometimes I am incredibly scared about the world. And often when I get scared, I rationalize my own place in it and maybe even the degree of danger the world is in. Sometimes when I read writers who come at their analysis from a Marxist perspective and this set of actions gets even more pronounced. And often, when that writer is Communist, I am able to at least roll my eyes a little bit and feel a little better. Angela Davis sort of splits the […]
A not 100% dreary book about suicide and mental health issues
Adam Haslett was sort of an award season darling 15 years ago for a really good collection of short stories called You are Not a Stranger Here. It’s really quite good. His novels have not landed as successfully, until now. This is such a strong novel. It’s kind of like what if Jonathan Franzen were capable of pathos. This is the story of a kind of middle-class, kind of strange, kind of fucked up family from Boston, by way of England, who as they grow up […]
Is that all they can do–die?
This is a charming and fun play to be sure. Especially, this is fun if you have read or recently re-read Hamlet. What makes it fun in general is the kind of back and forth between formality and informality that the characters go through. The premise of this play is that two relatively, but not entirely, minor characters in Hamlet are waiting in the wings of life for their various moments to show up to be on stage. It’s not that these are the actors […]
I am a little vexed by this book
The Mother of all Questions by Rebecca Solnit
In which the question is “Why don’t you have kids?” I work in a pretty Democratic-voting but ultimately culturally conservative environment, so nothing about this book rings untrue in the slightest….for the most part. I also think that a lot of these essays, like in the previous book, are fairly good distillations of essential points. But the issue is, that Rebecca Solnit seems to say all the right things. Certainly, for a relatively limited subset of ideas and people who hold opinions on these ideas, […]
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