Bookreview

I first read about Clancy Martin’s memoir sitting at the breakfast bar of a local restaurant. At the time I went every Sunday and read the New York Times Book Review. Whatever Sunday that happened to be, I read Alexandra Jacobs’ review and added it to my to-be-read list. I haven’t thought about the book much even as I’ve read several other texts on suicide and suicidal ideation over the few years since. Having now read it, I can scratch my head at Jacobs’ review and wonder: is this, in fact, a review? ...

I’ve been eyeballing Greenwell’s bluecovered Small Rain since the hardback hit my local bookstore’s shelves in 2024. I felt it reaching out for me, I could tell it would be sad and I didn’t know what flavour that sadness would be. I finally bought a copy a few months ago and have let it set on the living room table, to stare at for a few weeks, then I put it on my TBR shelf, away from the other up-next books that usually stack on that table. A few weeks ago I finished a book and without thinking at all I went to the shelf and pulled it down. Something about me knew it was time. Reading the first page, I started to worry—the writing is near-stream-of-consciousness, a style that exhausted me recently reading Mrs. Dalloway. Then, on the last line of the first page, that equally exhausting word: pandemic. ...

This was the November pick for our Small Press Fiction Book Club. I liked it! I wish I could say I loved it, but that’s not quite true. I found it really challenging to read. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, paired with very long sentences and a myriad of commas and semicolons and parentheticals takes a lot of effort to hold through. You can almost feel yourself running out of breath; I have to imagine that’s intentional. ...

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. ...

Notes p57 - There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went. See Hemingway quote, [[The Sun Also Rises]]. p139 - (The first description of Dan in his role as Doctor Sleep and what that looks/feels like for him.) p143 - He wasn’t as close to the surface anymore, but he was still there and still the same ugly, irrational sonofabitch he’d always been. ...

I eagerly await hearing what my book club folks think about Seethaler’s book. I thought it opened with a lovely picture, and then there were some vignettes that I found compelling, but ultimately this felt overlong (and it’s only 190 pages), or perhaps it just felt so slow as to be hard for me to focus on. Notes Author: Robert Seethaler Last read: 2025-10-24 Rating: 2.5 Form: Fiction ...

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’). ...