Pale Fire is a delightful escape-room of a novel, with layers of meaning, unreliablility, and puns that might seem a bit highfalutin but crucially does not take itself seriously. The conceit of a somewhat crazy man telling a story through...
There is something half-full about books by Amor Towles, and I can’t quite place it. Maybe it is just an undue obsession with trappings of wealth? Or maybe they are just without objectionability - feels like most proper literature is...
Maybe I am biased, predisposed by the forces of Canonized Culture, to find such great beauty in the stream-of-conscious depiction of a man (two? or just the one?) on an odyssey of his own making in Ireland - but this...
I think the parts that I found interesting in this book, Liu Cixin did not. There are some intriguing concepts here, I think alien astronomy during the cultural revolution is a cool setting to explore…but there is a also a...
A bit of an odd coincidence, I did not realize when reading His Majesty’s Dragon that it was basically just Master and Commander with dragons. And to be frank, I think the dragons did improve it a bit. I mean,...
I’ve been seeing references to Borges’ story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote around a bit, for whatever reason (it is the one about Pierre Menard, through diligent scholarship, rewriting and recreating Don Quixote, line for line). And classic Borges...
Most books I read which strive to be about the Black experience living in America are ultimately about trauma, for obvious reasons. If Beale Street Could Talk also has its fair share of trauma and no happy ending - but...
The term shadow cousins refers to family members that are excommunicated, not spoken of and ignored. At least in the parlance of the book; I suppose in real life as well, although I have not heard of it elsewhere. The...
A cute and lovely collection of prose on butterflies. The poetry - I’ve read some of Hesse’s poetry before, and I can’t really tell if he is a bad poet or it doesn’t come across in translation? For a writer...