The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Michael Chabon |
I get the sense, half-baked and unreliable at this point, that all these brash young lions of Brooklyn letters owe their style almost entirely to Philip Roth. Now I say half-baked because all I've re...
Posted by on Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:02:00 GMT |
Twelve Caesars and Freedom Just Around the Corner |
Rome and The United States are often the subject of more or less superficial comparisons, and unfortunately a comparative reading of these two very dissimilar books does nothing at all to deepen the p...
Posted by on Thu, 20 Sep 2007 08:51:00 GMT |
The Right Stuff; Tom Wolfe |
There is a perverted genius to the pairing of dapper, excitable Tom Wolfe with manly, taciturn astronauts and test pilots. What must they have thought of him? Leprechaun? Fruit Fly?The Right Stuff ...
Posted by on Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:36:00 GMT |
Boss & Our Gang |
Our Gang is a profane satire of Richard M Nixon by notorious pervert Philip Roth, and Boss is a vituperatively unobjective biography of Richard J Daley by tough-talking Chicago journalist Mike Royko. ...
Posted by on Sun, 02 Sep 2007 05:21:00 GMT |
Kafka On The Shore; Haruki Murakami |
This is the third Murakami book I've read (Wind-Up Bird & Hardboiled Wonderland), and all seem like different approaches toward the same essential idea. The protagonist is swept along by a series of ...
Posted by on Fri, 17 Aug 2007 14:03:00 GMT |
The Education of Henry Adams |
This is an astounding, surprising book. Henry Adams writes his life in the third person, looking back on the perpetual student and evaluating each episode by the degree of education provided. To me ...
Posted by on Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:40:00 GMT |
Slouching Toward Bethlehem; Joan Didion |
This is a collection of articles Joan Didion wrote in the mid-sixties, mostly for The Saturday Evening Post. It's divided into three sections, which I will treat in separate paragraphs.The first sect...
Posted by on Mon, 06 Aug 2007 09:46:00 GMT |
A Personal Matter & Tom Jones |
I so enjoyed the contrast of reading these two very different novels simultaneously that I thought I would unite my responses into one entry. Good thinking.A Personal Matter is a relentless punishing...
Posted by on Sat, 28 Jul 2007 05:20:00 GMT |
Guns, Germs, and Steel; Jared Diamond |
This book became iconic pretty fast, what? I must say it was not entirely what I thought it would be. i expected an alternative to the Penguin History of the World, but GGS is more a complement than...
Posted by on Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:42:00 GMT |
An African in Greenland |
This is a neat little book I picked up at The Strand because I liked the title. The author was bitten by a python while gathering coconuts in his native Togo, and instead of being initiated into the ...
Posted by on Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:04:00 GMT |
