I’d never read any Graham Swift before, but I picked up Last Orders in a thrift sale, not realizing that it had won a Man Booker Prize. I am trying to work my way through the Booker winners and nominees, and I’m just under half at my latest count. Swift is a contemporary British author, and I’ve heard his name mentioned many times in the academic work I referenced for my doctoral comps and beyond. I thought it was high time I gave him a […]
An interesting book about books that move us.
My dear friend M had read Edward Mendelsohn’s The Things That Matter some years ago and got me a copy for a birthday, saying she thought I would appreciate the discussion of classic literary texts from a professor’s point-of-view. I’m a bit of an English nerd (you know, being a lifelong reader, English major in college, and PhD in English), so books about books hold a certain appeal for me. Mendelsohn is a professor of Comparative Literature, so I was further curious to see how […]
The ugliness of beauty
It’s no secret that as an academic, I enjoy reading academic sendups. I also enjoy literary remakes, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty includes BOTH. Lucky me! I’ve read three of her five novels—White Teeth, The Autograph Man, and Swing Time—and I’m trying to work my way through her other two novels. I think she’s an amazing author, and I’ve long hoped that the kind of lightning in a bottle she captured in White Teeth could somehow find its way onto her pages again. And while […]
A satisfying end to a fun series
I’ve finally (regretfully) reached the end of the Percy Jackson books. It’s a little bittersweet finishing an enjoyable new series. It’s been highly enjoyable, however, and I do see myself returning to the series and recommending it to younger readers along the way. The nice thing about these books is that they’re fun without taking themselves too seriously and informational about mythology without being too heavy-handed in focus. In short: they’re appropriate for the audience to whom they are addressed. Percy is trying not to […]
Back into the groove with a maze plot.
Rick Riordan twists the plot a bit so that he breaks the predictability factor of the books. This is overall good for the series, as he has only one book to wrap up the story arc after this. Because I am a puzzle-person, the archetype of the maze or labyrinth has always been of interest to me (though please do not put me in one of those panic rooms), so I was probably going to find The Battle of the Labyrinth more interesting by default. […]
A more repetitive entry in the series.
I think this middle book might have been the weakest of the series for me—it was certainly the least memorable. While Percy falls into a sort of rhythm, Rick Riordan’s plotting starts to get a little paint-by-numbers in a way that makes me wonder if his enormous book output after the Percy Jackson books is being manned by a bookmill of ghostwriters. That said, I was glad to keep inhabiting the Percy universe and learn even more obscure mythology. Annabeth goes missing while Percy is […]
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