Bookreview

Notes Chapter 18, pg 223 – The Scrapbook. Long chapter of backstory on the Overlook. p335 – It was his father’s voice [on the radio]. ¶ “—kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always drag you down. Right this minute. . . ” ¶ “No!” he screamed back. “You’re dead, you’re in your grave, you’re no in me at all!” Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died. ...

For a few weeks, maybe months, I have been going back and forth on a piece about purpose. Purpose in the Big sense, the moral and lifelong sense, having some sort of overarching goal either for your life or for a chapter of your life. It started even before then as a germ in a doctor’s office, when a doctor said, “you seem like a very determined person,” in response to something that probably should have raised clinical questions, not praise of virtue. Over the weekend, I was in a quasi-rural Philadelphia town, having been to a cocktail party and arrived back to my hotel in that mix of gloomy and retrospective self-examination that tends to follow me home from social events. I started back on the purpose piece, and around 2am shut my iPad and tossed it into my bad deciding there was no purpose in it. ...

I love Hamlet. At one point, I knew a lot of it, though now down to only really knowing a few of the more famous bits and pieces. One of my more beloved memories is reciting a part of it with someone, sort of stumbling through it with them. This book also came highly recommended. I’m sorry to say, it didn’t connect too deeply for me. Much of it is quite sad, as you might expect given the subtitle. There were parts that I really liked, mostly contained in sentences or two here and there. One such: ...

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. ...