A Passage to India
A Passage to India is a moral story of a friendship, and I want to be able to say that the moral story that it tells is of course completely obvious these days and is in fact full of its...
Recent Posts
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Excellently written compassionate treatment, love the murder, its funny* how some mores seem so foreign and unimaginable and some mores seem to persist so strongly. I think what I found most brilliant was the different moral perspectives that Hardy sets...
A Sand County Almanac
I think this makes an excellent pairing with A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. The one, a bright-eyed celebration of the beauty and majesty of being alive and able to experience nature, the other (A Sand County Almanac), a reflection with...
Bangkok Wakes to Rain
I didn’t really know what to expect going into this, and I was quite pleasantly surprised. A clean and compelling novel of a somewhat experimental structure falls in and out of history, giving us brief moments in interconnected lives spanning...
The Dawnhounds
Good fun! Pirates and mushrooms and sci-fi murder-mystery-leads-to-worldending-political-mystery, and they kiss in the end. Didn’t really like the bit where I have to wait a while for the next book to come around, but if you do not find those...
I am a Cat
I am a cat is a delight! I guess just an old-timey I-can-haz-cheezeburger meme, but written by an author who I adore for the beauty and elegance of his prose and the delicacy of the relationships he portrays…which does feel...
Black Sun
Pretty good, really! It is a bit tropey, the pirate mermaid is a good bit and some fun sociopolitical drama is scattered throughout, has a refreshing fantasy setting. I think, had I read this when I was younger, I would...
Mason & Dixon
I think this is likely the best of Thomas Pynchon, one of the great novels of my lifetime, although I enjoyed his Bleeding Edge more. I don’t know that I’ve read a better book that was written since I’ve been...
Inherent Vice
When it comes down to it, this is basically just Bleeding Edge but with more Genre. Enjoyable enough as a detective mystery, and the counterculture voice is kind of fun - and, as I listened to the audiobook, Ron McLarty’s...
Walden
I listened to Walden while walking through the woods around Walden, and I gotta say - the words still ring true. Yes, he was a few hours walk from Boston, yes his mom probably did his laundry for him and...