I thought this was a lovely little book. Read for the small press fiction book club that I’m in, I certainly would never have known or read something like this without that. I thought the ‘satire’ of it all was fairly surface, but I found that surface very pleasant. The writing is a bit whimsical, and the wordplay pleased me something terrible. I also found it oddly musical (particularly the recurrent, ‘While You Were Out’). ...
A coworker bought this book for me at a garage sale over the weekend – I think that’s rather touching! It’s a sweet little book, and the illustrations are lovely. I love my cat (Ripley), and sometimes I get a little worried that maybe she actually hates me, and I’ve googled things like, “how to tell if your cat likes you” in the past, I’ll admit it. So, this book does sort of speak to me. The Big Rip is sitting right behind my head, on top of the couch, as I type this. ...
DNF around page 100. Very, very, much not for me I’m afraid. This was a runner-up for my book club, and I was really hoping it’d win. So, when I saw a copy in a bookstore while traveling, I picked it up and took it to a bar to read a bit. I’ve struggled with it for around 10 days since. This book centers on teenage or thereabouts characters, who share a deep love of music, and are often musicians themselves. This means there is a lot of talk about different songs, lyrics, etc. Unfortunately, I absolutely detest reading song lyrics. This is a me problem, I want to be clear. It happens often enough, and the sort of saccharine or overly emotional quality to the dialogue alongside doesn’t work for me. In many cases, I just could not believe the characters or the way in which they spoke, nothing felt true to me. ...
See my critique on TBinDC. Notes pix - Liberals prize two things above all: freedom and pluralism. pxiv - Liberal philosophers disagree with one another about many other things as well. Some liberals, like Robert Nozick, are libertarians; they believe that redistribution from rich to poor is fundamentally unjust. Other liberals, like Rawls, do not share that belief at all. They might even believe that large-scale redistribution is mandatory. So long as you are committed to freedom, you can be a liberal whether you agree with Nozick or instead Rawls. Other liberals, like Philip Pettit, emphasize the central importance of a principle of freedom as nondomination, by which no one is subject to the will of another. (TB: nondomination, see D. Allen JBMOD) ...
I bought this without preconception from Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, which I make a point to visit and support every time I’m in town. I’d already gathered up something like 4 books, but when I got to the counter I saw this sitting there promoting their book club. Short, rather provocative title. I picked it up, opened to a random page and it was a pretty graphic gay sex scene. Obviously I purchased it instantly. ...
I did not approach this very familiar with Wallace’s work. I read ‘Consider the Lobster’ years ago and found it fantastic, but never searched for anything else. I’ve been in a Lynch kick most of the year, and when I heard recently that DFW wrote a long essay about him, I threw this book into my thriftbooks cart. There are seven essays here. I read 3.5, and I’m going to talk about them briefly, separately, and then come back to the collection. ...
I finished Catch-22 and needed a short and nice palette cleanser. This did the job very well! It is an uncomplicated, unchallenging read, and comfortable being as such. I find Dex so relatable as a character, and Mosscap lets us see human behavior from an outsider view. It works as well in this book as it does in the first, in which I wrote a lot more about this. I didn’t feel this one quite hit the peaks of the first, perhaps because it feels much more like a series of vignettes than a narrative. I don’t mind at all, but it did make me think I should revise my rating of A Psalm for the Wild-Built up to 4.5 or even 5 stars, as this felt like a 4 star read to me. ...
Catch-22 has been on my shelf for maybe one or two years, and on my reading list for years beyond that. I’ve been told again and again how much I would enjoy it. For whatever reason, be it timing, expectations, or something else, I was left feeling ambivalent. I really enjoyed the first hundred pages, finding it terribly funny. I can see the comparisons to Vonnegut, easily. The circumstances, the names, the insane bureaucracy, it all feels like great satire. However, I really struggled to hold focus through the middle third or maybe from about page 120 or so until the last 20 or 30 pages. I felt like I was seeing the same thing over, and over, and over, again. One could say this is intentional, especially given the recurrent deja vu passages. And surely some of it IS intentional, and some of it works very well! What I started to find grating is that I was reading the same joke over and over again. ...
Obligatory “I don’t really read comics much” prelude, then: this might be my favorite comic? Aside from The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller; I have a panel of this comic blown up and framed in my living room, Batman snapping a shotgun in half, declaring: “THIS is the weapon of the ENEMY. We do not NEED it. We will not USE it.”), this is the one that I’ve read the most. ...
What a weird book! I spent the first 50 pages wondering, “Am I going to hate this?” My hackles were raised by the Lispector quote; I tried to read Apple in the Dark some months ago and found it absolutely grueling and couldn’t finish. But I found this quite readable! Mechanically, the writing is serviceable but not amazing. Some of the dialogue is clunky, and sounds sort of rigid. Then again, I think our characters are pretty strange people, and for some of them, I think they would speak like this to appear more sophisticated than they actually are. So, I’m willing to go with some of the very strange dialogue. Someone in our book club pointed out that the italic usage is odd, and I didn’t notice this so much until the ending 40 pages or so (which I read after the book club). There are definitely some strange empresses. All that said, I never bumped on the writing like I sometimes do, it all flowed rather nicely. I found it very readable and often enjoyed reading it, even if I was not at all enjoying the characters’ decisions or actions. ...