The Snow Leopard
Reading this brought to mind Susan Sontag’s On Photography, or at least what I remember of it/what I imagine it as saying, having read it a number of years ago. Not to say that they have anything in common or...
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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...
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...
House of Spirits
The thing is, Gabriel García Márquez is tough competition. This is One Hundred Years of Solitude with worse writing and better politics, I am not likely the first to say, but the writing is in fact still briliant. The story...
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
An entirely self-indulgent conversation with a passionate believer in the wonder and the beauty of the natural world, full of excellent tidbits and charming vignettes, of life by the creek and Life by the Creek. I like the review that...
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...
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...
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.”