I read this book first when I was like 14 to impress my brother’s friend Scott. He was into Nine Inch Nails and Pantera and he played a bunch of Sega/SNES RPGs and so anyway, yeah, you read some Vampire novels if you want to be in Scott’s good graces. So it read it then. And when I started my Goodreads twenty years later I gave this a 3/5 based on my memory of it. But I was wrong. It’s just good. It really is, […]
When is a book not a book? When it is Steps.
I don’t one hundred percent know the story of Jerzy Kosinski, but basically he was a literary wunderkind in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. He published three novels, two of which won major American awards, he seemingly came out of nowhere, and then he was almost immediately swamped with accusations of fraud and/or plagiarism. This novel….well, I guess it doesn’t actually call itself a novel or anything. It calls itself Steps, but then it doesn’t designate. It’s a series of vignettes, some of which are […]
As they had accepted fate without thinking about it, so they clung now to the empty hours that were left over from life.
So I live in Richmond, VA and it’s a weird town when it comes to dealing with its own past. On the one had, it’s the site of a lot of pre-Civil War colonial trade. Founded by William Byrd and named for a spot on the Thames, Richmond has a kind of desperately clung-to aristocracy that is just a pure fabrication (like every aristocracy, sure, but more like a copy of a copy). Ellen Glasgow is Richmond’s own chronicler of this kind of desperation. Richmond […]
Bete Snore
I almost stopped reading this novel a few different times, even though it didn’t take a lot of effort to read it. At first, I was not even clear on why I wanted to read it. I don’t actually eat meat, so at first I wanted to see about it, but then as I got into it I thought it was going to be something to the effect of “hork hork vegetarians is so dumb” kind of stuff, which isn’t really all that appealing. Vegetarians […]
I think I like the stories a lot more than the novels.
On the whole, this is a really good collection. I like the stories more than the novels because they are much more satisfying puzzleboxes than the novels seem to be. In part, because the novels have to be grandiose to justify their length, but often the mysteries themselves are no more strong than in the shorter stories. Maybe that’s why there’s 56 stories and only four novels. In this collection, we have the following stories, for which I will do a few capsule reviews. “A […]
THAT CAKE WAS FOR AFTER THE FUNERAL, NOT FOR YOU.
This book, much like its protagonist Helen Moran, doesn’t really know what it wants to be. And that’s ok most of the time because a suicide implies a mystery in a way not every other death does. And so a book about a suicide can be a mystery, and because it’s about grief, it can be a wandering, wayward affair with no real issue. I am teaching Hamlet, and today we talked about the “To Be or Not To Be” speech and the students grappled with […]
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