December 2011
21 posts
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“We’ve tried to build our love beyond each individual moment, yet we can...”
– Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay
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House of Holes
House of Holes was an amazing, raucous, funny, and titillating read. I’m going to dissect why each of these adjectives are perfect descriptors of Baker’s Book of Sex.
Amazing - the writing here is incredible. Baker’s usual fine-tooth adjectives and methods for description were turned on their heads, yet stayed intact. Instead of an intensely introspective word garden, Baker...
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My 11 favorite books of 2011!
Here are the 11 books I read in 2011 and liked best in alphabetical order by author:
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA - Mikhail Bulgakov
STET - James Chapman
THE MARRIAGE PLOT - Jeffrey Eugenides
PORNOGRAFIA - Witold Gombrowicz
TICKNOR - Sheila Heti
NEVER LET ME GO - Kazuo Ishiguro
GRAVITY’S RAINBOW - Thomas Pynchon
HOME - Marilynne Robinson
SWAMPLANDIA! - Karen Russell
SANATORIUM UNDER...
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Here is an audioclip of THIRD REICH by Roberto...
Margaret Atwood Interview with Deborah Treisman →
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Who Will Be the Literary Legends of Our Era? →
David Foster Wallace
Marilynne Robinson
Jonathan Franzen
Cormac McCarthy
To name a few…
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“He had often wondered what difference it would make. But the emptiness in place...”
– Alice Monro - ”Leaving Maverley”
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“I have withdrawn, to be sure, and refuse to fight. But within the safety of my...”
– The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery (I posted this quote a long time ago, but still love it.)
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“Then came a new resident, a musician in his 80s with a touch of forgetfulness...”
– A beautiful, beautiful paragraph from this story in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/us/an-aging-jazz-pianist-finds-a-new-audience.html?emc=eta1
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“My fiction is simply something that goes on between my mind and the page.”
– The Situation in American Writing: Marilynne Robinson
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ToBS R1: hating on Jonathan Franzen vs. hating on... →
LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS.
I should write a follow-up: people nagging you to read FREEDOM vs people insisting INCREDIBLY LOUD is fine fiction.
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State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
State of Wonder is a lush and living novel about Marina, a scientist, who travels to Brazil. She’s chasing two phantoms- the story about the death of her colleague, Anders, and the woman he was chasing, a scientist whose lab, in the depths of the rainforest, is developing a drug for the company Marina works for. She’s caustic, selfish, and disdains interption. In a way, Marina is...
“Some time has passed since I last raised my voice to the multitude, and whereas...”
– Harper’s Magazine, On Simple Human Decency, Ben Metcalf
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“Friendships, like friends, all die. All those gone nights of witty...”
– Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love
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“Even when I talk about the book it’s always like “if you had an aerial picture...”
– Karen Russell, at this awesome AWL interview!
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Good Reads 2011 Cheat Sheet →
People thought Swamplandia! was derivative?!
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The Literary Cubs - The New Inquiry in the New... →
This is an interesting article, and at first I was WAY into The New Inquiry (as per this article, since I’d never heard of it before) and what they seem to be doing. Then I just got really bummed, because they seem to be perpetrating all the ills they rail against: elitism, isolation, etc. They all seem to come from some sort of privilege, and the result of that is a profile in the NYT. ...