And Then There Were None
Reading Christie I am frequently struck with the thought: why isn’t Christie more popular? And then I remember that she is the best selling novelist of all time - Wikipedia currently has her tied with the bard, but he was...
Recent Posts
The Memoirs Of Stockholm Sven
There is, for me, an undeniable allure in Svalbard and the Arctic (and Antarctic). Austere, windswept desolation, wide vistas, creatures eking out a living amongst the snow and ice - it is romantic. It feels so alien, so antithetical to...
Debt
I was, to be frank, prepared to be bored by this - “debt” is a dry, intuitive concept which seemed little deserving of 500 pages of exegesis. The book seemed vaguely Important and not a bit hip, but not…interesting. Then...
The Brothers Karamazov
I got into, started studying and eventually made a career out of computer programming because first I wanted to make clouds. The wispy vortices, plastic and mutable at a timescale just longer than that which is immediately perceptible, seemed the...
Moby-Dick or, the Whale
I first read Moby Dick when I was around 12, enjoying the Adventure and Fun Names and Cool Whale Facts, struggling through the passages that I did not understand or were boring - in an attempt to prove to myself...
The Honjin Murders
I was curious what a classic Japanese murder mystery would be and I think actually it is not entirely my cup of tea. There is a sparsity of prose that I recognize and value in other contexts as somewhat emblematic...
Ema, The Captive
This book is a bit difficult to describe. I think the author’s note said something about it being an “inverted gothic romance,” which, like, fair, I guess. Ema, the captive, experiences the inverse of gothic romance, experiences the worst that...
Frank Sonnets
Poetry: hard to judge? I don’t know how intrinsic that is, or how ignorant I am. I read through this because someone I know said it was important to them, and I wanted to see why. I think I can...
The Journey
I mean, a personal predilection for just a little bit of pretension, for the fluency with literature and the literati, definitely does have an impact on my opinion of Sergio Pitol - lists of names and works and influences and...
Stoner
I think I spend too much time trying to solve for the author of a book, in general, when I read. Really I suppose I should kill the author, that is the cool thing to do. But I think here...