Reviews

I love Anthony Bourdain. When I moved to Chicago the first time, in 2013, I’d put on Parts Unknown late at night in my dorm and I’d fall asleep watching that show. I’ve turned it, and other Bourdain shows, on as comfort watches many times in the 13 years between then and now. I appreciate and respect his worldview and what seemed like his mission in those shows, which felt like intentional breaking down of barriers and celebration of diversity and how diversity can be a great unifying thing. ...

One of two Ernaux texts that a friend from work brought me back from Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. Like just about every Ernaux, I love it. It’s a short text, only 76 pages. Ernaux’s clinical style and cold near-analysis of memory, recounting her father and the course of his life, make for lovely reading. I’m not sure why, but something about this way of writing makes everything so tangible. I could practically smell the place. Ernaux is one of those writers that I can’t read too much of, lest my writing just turn into an imitation of hers. ...

It’s difficult to approach this book, written in 2018, with the experiences of all the years which followed its publication. I found myself agitated throughout the reading. Many of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s points seem utterly naive and optimistic. There is a section of the book in which they lay out three potential scenarios for the future of the Trump Administration and the country. In one, their darkest, they describe a variety of “extreme” sounding ideas which they ultimately conclude to be unlikely. Each and every one has now occurred. ...

A coworker recently recommended this book to me, thinking I would enjoy it for my interest in writing, Lincoln, and language generally. He wasn’t wrong, I did like the book. I picked it up expecting something a little different from what it is. Wills book is a strange combination of technical (if that’s the word) and historical. Technical, in the sense the Wills diagrams the Address and several other orations, but not in a grammatical sense. He uses the framework of the Greek Funeral Oration. So, we get a lot of Grecian vocabulary; words like epainesis and parainesis, logoslergon, dikaion, etc. It took me a minute to get used to this, as I’d anticipated more of a grammatical diagram. Still, I did find it interesting to read about Pericles and several other funeral orations. ...

I picked this up to see if I’d be interested in the format of the 33 1/3 books. I’m not sure to what extent they are like this one, as they seem to all be from different authors. This one is very musically inclined, as in, lots of musical staves, talking of majors and minors and key changes and etc. etc. I ended up skimming a lot of it, because I don’t have the vocabulary or the knowledge to connect many of those words to sounds or concepts, which I feel a little embarrassed to admit. I can read sheet music a bit; I played the trombone, but I was the kind of player that didn’t want to practice and just wrote slide positions on the sheet. I love listening to music, and I have a good feel for it, but I don’t know what I’m looking at on paper. ...

I don’t often read interview books, especially on film. I tend to not really enjoy books about movies/movie industry/etc (thinking about the Francis Ford Coppola book), for reasons I don’t understand. But, David Lynch is my favorite director, and what sets this apart is that I can hear his voice when I read him responding to Chris Rodley’s questions, and sometimes that’s good for a big laugh. I don’t have complicated thoughts on this – if you’re a fan of Lynch, it feels like required reading. Very glad I picked it up. ...

I’m not going to write a long review of Arendt’s report on Eichmann’s trial as I picked it up specifically to explore the elements of justice that are described therein. I also feel this is a difficult book to review; I have no historical expertise on the subject and am unqualified to evaluate anything about it other than, maybe, the prose. And the prose, I like. Arendt’s writing here—despite the topic—is quite a bit more “fun” than her writing in The Human Condition, in that she writes with a lot of irony and a dry humor. ...

Theodoridou’s recent book is my small press club’s pick for June, and what a strange little book. It is a retelling, kind of, of the Bluebeard story. I think I first encountered the Bluebeard story in Stephen King’s The Shining, but probably before in some form as well. In general, I think the book is quite good. Theodoridou’s framing device for Sour Cherry features an unnamed narrator reciting the events of the tale as though they are a ghost story, presumably to “you” the reader, who also may or may not be a child. ...

I bought this because the trailer for Laika’s adaptation dropped a few weeks ago. The trailer is one of the best I have ever seen, so I felt inclined to read the source before the movie. The book is somewhat a kid’s book, I would put it alongside A Series of Unfortunate Events or Spiderwick. A major difference is most of those books are pretty short, and this one is some 500 pages. I do think it is a little too long for what it is doing and I ended up skimming through some parts because they felt a little rote and a little overwritten. Still, it’s a fanciful world and I liked the characters. While I doubt I continue the series, I’m very much looking forward to the film. ...

I became aware of Guibert via Philippe Besson’s Lie With Me, and so picked up Written in Invisible Ink, a collection of short stories which I had mixed feelings about but generally liked. Crazy for Vincent has been on my saved titles list on ThriftBooks for quite a while and I finally found a copy. It’s a short little diary, told reverse-chronologically, of Hervé’s love for Vincent. It begins in 1989 at the end of November, with Vincent’s death. I often forgot that we are moving back through time, through the period of Hervé’s knowing of and love for (obsession with?) Vincent. In a way it is fitting that we start with Vincent’s death, because we have no sense of the book-Hervé’s continued life afterwards, it is as if he, too, died. ...