bibliographing

Like verbivore, I will deviate from my bookish focus today, my birthday, to propagate a meme. This one about the consumption partner who is, I’m sure, carrying around my shopping bags and buying me a delicious dinner as you read this. (I’m going with verbivore’s modification of the meme, pretty much, which has more-literary questions, [...]

In a comment on my super-brief “Descent into the Maelström” post the other day, Amateur Reader said, “This is one of the Poe stories where the narrator’s clinical tone doesn’t match events. All of these terrible things happen, and he sounds like he presenting the results of a lab experiment. Unsettling.” This was one of [...]

Very busy this week, but thankful to Amateur Reader for reminding me of one of my former favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories, which I had completely forgotten the existence of. (Yes, that worries me too.) “Descent into the Maelström” really does have some of Poe’s best descriptive writing”—and it’s sea-related, too!
Here the vast bed of [...]

European explorers long hoped to find a great civilization in the heart of the South American rainforest, and many went to their death tramping through the jungle looking for it. David Grann’s The Lost City of Z bills itself as a book about the search for that civilization. But it is much better described as [...]

William Lobdell started out in the early 1990s as an average, secular Christian, working as an editor for a paper owned by the Los Angeles Times. But after divorcing his high school sweetheart and accidentally getting his new girlfriend pregnant, he was drifting until someone told him he had a “God-shaped hole” in his life. [...]

Possibly (though probably not*) because lately I’ve been reading so many authors I had disliked ages ago, and apparently like now, I picked up D.H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox the other day. Lady Chatterley’s Lover had not been a hit with me, though I do like his poetry.
And I did enjoy the novella, though it [...]

In his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of In Hazard, John Crowley describes the book as “one of the great gripping true sea stories of modern literature, for much of its length rich with salt spray and engine oil and skillful desperate men doing unimaginably difficult tasks.” I don’t think a more apt description [...]

One of the great pleasures of Two Years Before the Mast, as I’ve noted, is its picture of California before there was anything there. As a historical document it’s really a treasure. I’ve never been to California, but I know there is more to San Francisco now than the presidio, and that hide-droghing has fallen [...]

In January 1897, Stephen Crane was on the steamship Commodore, headed from Jacksonville, Florida to Cuba, when it foundered and sank. Crane made it ashore and wrote “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” a newspaper account of the ordeal, but he also wrote “The Open Boat,” a really great short story.*
Four men in a boat: captain, with [...]

Does it even count as a Sunday when I don’t have to work tomorrow? I suppose it does, but the day loses all of its bittersweet qualities that way. Which actually means I can focus more on reading without guilt about not doing all those other pesky things that should be done.
So today so far [...]