The Magus by John Fowles
Every once in a while a novel will come out and it will be lauded as the takedown of the a certain kind of man — a literary author, a wayward dude, a divorced dad, the fuck boy. And while sometimes the novels are good, they never quite feel the takedown people want them to be, and as if often the case, they weren’t ever really supposed to be a takedown at all. In fact, I would say of course that literature, as it’s always […]
Season of Storms by Andrzej Sapkowski
Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe
Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
Season of Storms – 4/5 Stars If I haven’t said it before, I really like the sidequests more than the main quest. So far I have read the first two main novels, this novel which is a bit of a prequel, and the two story collections, but of which tell of previous adventures and previous meetings. I would gladly read many more novels and collections that move away from the main story for a few reasons. One, the main story is often focused on political […]
Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers
Like a lot of Richard Powers novels, this one has a lot going on. It’s not even so much that, as he’s applying a narrative lens to many different things and then putting them into the novel. This novel like others of his, focuses on telling multiple threads and stories all together, tying them through a thematic lens more than a plot one. So what’s our lens here? Specifically it’s “Operation Wandering Soul”, which was a propaganda program during the US-Vietnam War designed to cause […]
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire Pale Fire remains one of the funniest and most impressive books I’ve ever read, and for me is Nabokov’s absolute masterpiece, especially in English. The book begins with a brief introduction from one of our two narrators, Charles Kinbote. Charles Kinbote is a professor and in this book will be editing the long poem of his colleague John Shade. John Shade, also a professor, has recently died and left a poem in intricately ordered index cards. We come to understand that Kinbote has […]
Minty Alley by CLR James
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandr Hemon
No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Lazarus Project This novel came out in 2008 in the middle of the 2008 presidential election. That doesn’t really have much to do with the plot here, but the novel makes several references to the Iraq war as a backdrop to parts of the present action, as well as the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In addition, the novel spends a lot of time in early 20th century America, with a special focus on Eastern European immigrants in the US. The novel is mostly […]
Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut
Another Vonnegut book I am rereading, this one from 1979 and more or less starting off his 80s and 90s run. It’s another book that makes me laugh now to reread and wonder what in the world I must have thought was going on when I read it when I was 15. Anyway, this book also speaks to the idea that if something meaningful happened in the United States during the 20th century, there’s a good chance it’s showed up as a kind of subplot […]