Last month, the LA Times published an article on the quasi-popularity of reprints. One of the spotlighted publishing houses was New York Review Books, specifically NYRB Classics, which has helped me find two really great reads this year (Names on the Land and Sunflower). I say “helped me find” because I, knowing myself the [...]
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I often find myself feeling guilty that so many of the reviews I post in this blog, especially for more contemporary works, are middling-to-negative. But then I read something like Frankenstein and can only say, well, what do you expect? Mary Shelley has done wonders with framing stories here, so that gets big points [...] Descartes’ Bones is an effort to take one story, the convoluted history of the remains of René Descartes, and wrap it up in a larger one—basically the story of the Enlightenment and its legacy. The second thread there is, obviously, sweeping, but tethering it to the history of Descartes’s skeleton means that Russell Shorto [...] I have been lax in my reading. I have been shopping. For non-books! Fall is my weak season, shopping-wise. I mean strong season. I mean I am morally weak and do a lot of shopping. I am a fan of warm sweaters and dark colors and also of tweed, and these tastes conspire at [...] Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey recently edited State by State: a Panoramic Portrait of America, in which some pretty awesome writers each take a state (always their home state?) and write an essay on it. I’m excited to read the whole thing (mostly) in order, but when it came the other day I jumped [...]
So, the question is his: “What tomes are waiting patiently on your shelves?“ Well, it is quite a list, and one I hope to work through slowly but surely on this blog. I’ll try to limit myself to books I’m at least 80% certain I’ll read, but you know, the future is unpredictable. Continue reading Booking Through Thursday In The New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner described Netherland as “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting, and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.” And since reading it myself, I’ve been wondering what I could add to that assessment. [...] This post is definitely enough to win Marilynne Robinson a second chance with me. Was this beauty really there in Gilead and I missed it? Gyula Krúdy makes me wish my Hungarian went beyond “szeretlek” and “a viszontlátásra.” John Lukacs warns in his indispensable introduction to the NYRB edition of Sunflower that no matter how beautiful it may seem, we are missing so much in even a good translation, and based on what I have read I would definitely [...] Penelope Lively’s Consequences starts out, so it seems, as yet another novel of England during World War II. In the late 1930s, Lorna gets in one of many arguments with her mother—she doesn’t share the goals her upper-middle class family has set for her and wants some independence. She runs out and takes a [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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