I can’t really decide whether Dumas is great without being good, or instead good without being great - I suppose it depends on the point of view. He is unquestionably amazing, astonishing, a grandfather of Adventure as a genre. Sure...
You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?” You try so hard but you don’t understand Just what you will say when you get home Because...
The primary thrust of this book - using dialectical materialist/Marxist analysis to demonstrate the evils of Colonialism - seems kind of wild to me, from a historiographical standpoint. The only people who I can imagine these days denying the abstract...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...