February 2012
15 posts
3 tags
“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism...”
– Unbelievable, Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives
2 tags
JK ROWLING WRITING A NOVEL FOR ADULTS! →
Bare bones on the details, NYT, but still, news that made my week! YAY!
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
– David Foster Wallace (via millionsmillions)
In memoriam of DFW, whose 50th birthday would have been today.
3 tags
3 tags
“Lately I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency in myself to accept things the...”
– Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives
3 tags
The Missionary Position
This book is a polemic against Mother Theresa and makes big, but interesting claims.
I went into this with high expectations that weren’t quite satisfied. (I’m sure Hitch would have had some sort of funny quip about sex in response.) This book was a long essay, and I think it could have been more powerful shorter. As it was, the length made it feel un-credible, not incredible. It...
4 tags
Random Family
It is my fervent belief that this book should be required reading in every high school in America. It’s that good, so good that I think if every high schooler read it, this country would be better, filled with more emotionally developed people, maybe filled with people who are more understanding and empathetic.
This book is devastating. It’s not a feel-good book, and actually this...
3 tags
3 tags
“There’s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
– Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives
So I started The Savage Detectives yesterday and of course already love it, and I hate to be that lame as to already be quoting it (from the 6th page and I’m only 49 pages in) when I could be using this time to read it, but, come on! This quote might be...
4 tags
Motherless Brooklyn - Jonathan Lethem
Just about when the title of the book is explained, I started to love Motherless Brooklyn. That’s when I saw the tenderness and humanity in it, the little gem of something shining through the prose. Somehow, I assume that Lethem loved this book the same way as he was writing it, an expansion as he got to know his characters better, as they lived and did in his own neighborhood; his...
4 tags
She Came to Stay - Simone de Beauvoir
I’m trying to think of an un-offensive way to write that She Came to Stay was like Hemmingway at his best but if he was a woman. It was set in Paris, and about the peaceful love between two that turns into self-doubt in one. We usually only get this story from a male perspective, Hemmingway’s, but in She Came to Stay we see the woman’s side. The love between Francoise and...
3 tags
“He hadn’t known how stupid pain could make you and thought it should be...”
– Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
