Review A friend gifted this book to me for my birthday last month. I’m glad they did, because I’d have missed it otherwise! I did not quite know what to expect going in, but it proved to be a lovely mix of memoir, history, and question-asking. Very me. I’m going to keep this constrained to just my experience reading the book. This has been one of my most notated books in recent memory and a lot of my notes are questions. I’m going to resurrect my dusty substack to meander through some of those. I’ll edit this review later with links to those posts. ...

Review This was an impulse buy. I read this several years ago at the height of my Francophile days when I was able to speak French about half as well as I could read it. Now I can read it okay and speak it only when drunk, and quite poorly. My mom told me a week or two ago that she wanted me to think about going to Paris again. This is something I have wanted to do for years but I have never traveled internationally and not much domestically. You read Baldwin and Hemingway and Hugo and the others and see Paris as this imperfectly perfect place. Somewhere that a lost person can go to figure things out. I am not convinced any such place really exists outside of the mind, but in the same breath I’ll say context matters. Anyway I’m filling out passport paperwork again and maybe I will save enough to go and cheaply. ...

Review I bought the Picador Modern Classics hardcover of this a week or two ago on a whim. I was trying to find gifts for family and ended up buying this for myself instead. I think this is my third read of the book? I read a lot of Isherwood aroundabouts 2013 when I was fresh out of high school and struggling with being gay. It didn’t really matter that the time period was all wrong, or that things were so different. A lot of things weren’t different, and it was more or less about reading books that showed relationships and love in a non-heterosexual way. ...

Review It’s finally done, I’ve read everything that Cormac ever published. What a year. I plan to write something about that elsewhere, but for now, Suttree. I think this is Cormac’s longest novel at nearly 500 pages. It is episodic in nature and the episodes are presented without a lot of scaffolding to let you know. Cormac provides you with the changing of the seasons and that is the major progressive force of the novel. There is little plot other than Suttree’s sort of underboiling search for self. I think you’d have to read it a few times to really mine it, and I think there is something there to mine. ...

Review Quotes Page 25 >White > There’s nothing to follow. It’s all right. The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didnt know that. I thought they were indestructible. They werent. Page 53 >Black >No. I didnt. I didnt know what I was. But I thought I was in charge. I never knowed what that burden weighed till I put it down. That might of been the sweetest thing of all. To just hand over the keys. ...

Review McCarthy’s third novel. The one I’ve enjoyed the least. It is very dark, about someone with a sad life who descends into depravity. I read in two sittings, last Sunday and today. It feels like McCarthy still finding his form. The story is more or less a character study, following Ballard throughout his life. It’s difficult to say why I leave so uninterested in Ballard. It it not an interesting thing to be sad and lonely. Maybe the things that happen to a person to render them this way can be interesting, but watching a person descend was not for me. Ballard is dealt a bad hand and makes no decision to help himself, or even to not hurt others. He demonstrates little care for anyone, and is cold and isolated to the point of being a figment of nature. ...

Review Review from 7/2024 In the opening chapters of Stoner, Archer Sloane asks a young William, “Don’t you know about yourself yet?” Stoner seems always to be pulled between the idea of what he wants and what he is willing to do. He thinks constantly about what would be burdensome to others. Throughout the book, his placidity verges on ambivalence — as if he is aloof to the living of his own life. Sloane tells him later that he must remember what he is, and what he has chosen to become. We follow Stoner’s becoming for the rest of his life. ...

Review When I was in high school, we lived in a little * apartment in rural Illinois. It was across the street, a short walk from the factory where my mom (and several relatives) worked. We were on the South side of the tracks - a small open field separated us from them. Trains no longer run through this track and haven’t for years, as far as I know. I used to walk over to the high school, only about a mile away, but rarely with sidewalks available. ...

Review I stayed up til 2AM last night (this morning…) to finish reading this, and I’m having kind of a hard time rating it. Very unlike Stephen King, the last third is a 5-star book. I rarely mind King’s endings, but a lot of them struggle a bit. This one didn’t, though I could understand some grumbling about parts of it. I did find it terribly slow to start, and I thought the relationship between Mears and Susan was excruciatingly boring and shallow, especially thinking about the romance in 11/22/63. ...