The Magic Mountain
As a book, certainly a very good one, although as a Great Book I found it a bit middling. It has a certain uniqueness that is intriguing, a story that wavers and a temporality that wanes - and occasionally waxes...
Europe
Don Quixote
A bit awkward at times, a bit of a mouthful, as perhaps waranted given centuries of separation. Like a young deer struggling to walk, there are moments of grace and wit that are astounding - but of course my metaphor...
The Odyssey
My thoughts on the Odyssey are largely similar to my thoughts on The Iliad, in the extent to which this story told millenia ago about a people and a culture distant in all manors from mine remains engaging, entertaining, and...
If on the winters night a traveler
I was wondering a lot about greatness while reading this. I don’t think Italo Calvino is one of the greats, but I do love what he does. There is something a bit Borgesian about this, maybe Kafkaesque or maybe a...
Wuthering Heights
I had to read this to better understand Hark! A Vagrant. And now I do! Everyone was so much more awful than I was expecting, and it kept getting worse. Great book
The Iliad
Lots of X begat Y, lots of and Petracliffs, he had 50 black ships too. But I mean surely this was just the Avengers, a few millennia ago? Of a comparable level of cultural cachet! And the parts that were...
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Fun & funky pursuit of a killer and pursuite of the killt, whodunnit and also just whatdunandwen, little bit of Christie and a little bit of Groundhog day, and a little bit of (frankly, somewhat cumbersome) sci-fi oddity. That frame...
Ulysses
I mean I thought this was pretty great actually. Tedious, sure, full of itself, sure, riddled with references and languages I either got, or as may happen, did not. I’m fine with a bit of navel-gazing, I can appreciate it,...
Dawn of Everything
Graerber and Wengrow paint a compelling and beautiful painting of new potentials for understanding the past & present. They set up a neat dichotomy between a Rousseaun and Hobbesian view of the origins of humanity, before bravely pointing out that...
Murder on the Orient Express
It’s got mystery, it’s got murder, it’s got train travel, it’s got the line “Hercule Poirot addressed himself to the task of keeping his moustaches out of the soup.”