enthusiastic reader

“Homage to Hemingway” by Julian Barnes, New Yorker, July 4, 2011 I’ve never read anything by Julian Barnes before. He’s among the many writers I know by name alone. I loved this story, maybe because I have writing on the brain and this story is about a notable novelist whose writing fortunes are slipping as the conventional wisdom condemns “the aging white male author.” It’s heartbreaking, really, that the work of an individual, even a  white male author , can be so cruelly dismissed. The story is in three parts, which mirrors the Hemingway story “Homage to Switzerland,” which the protagonist uses as a writing sample in his workshops. He’s surprised to see that Hemingway is out of vogue and judged on his reputation, not on the text itself, and the protagonist is slowly stripped of his authorial power as the students question his (and Hemingway’s) motives. The story also notes how his novels are dismissed by publishers and fall out of fashion, even as he tries to capture his...

Side by side comparisons of Madame Bovary passages. Chapter VIII: via Maude Marmur "On the dark wood panels were large gilded frames with names written in black letters on their lower borders...Those that followed could barely be made out because the light from the lamps, directed on the green cloth of the billiard table, left the rest of the room in shadow. It turned the hanging canvases brown and highlighted only the cracks in the varnish; and from all the large gilt-edged black squares only some lighter part of the painting would emerge here and there--a pale forehead, two eyes staring at you, wigs unfurling over the powdered shoulders, red suits or perhaps the buckle of a garter at the top of a fleshy calf." Chapter VIII, Via Geoffrey Wall "On those dark-panelled walls, great gilded frames each displayed a black-lettered inscription...The rest of the sequence was scarcely visible, because the lamplight, directed down on to the green baize of the billiard...

Spoilers exist in this document. Putting aside all the people who hate Jonathan Franzen for having been born, for getting another book contract, for being anticipated and welcomed by many reviewers, for having lots of fans, for being forgiven by Oprah, for writing novels with sometimes unlikable characters (unlikable by being wrong, judgmental, alive on the page, imperfect, not behaving as the reader might like, just as people in our own real lives are wont to do), Freedom, having been described as being about "how we live," has that element, certainly, but also lives and breathes its own air. It's not a documentary, after all, but is a family story, and its characters should not be held as archetypes, but must be taken at face value as they act within their story. As readers, we're shown glimpses of the Berglund saga by four distinct characters: Walter, Patty, Joey, and Richard. It cannot be over-emphasized that these distinct characters are not us,...

I have a website where these old posts used to be housed. But that site has turned into a portfolio and services portal, not a good place to house my thoughts about the books I'm reading. So here we are.

The best books I’ve read between January and June of 2010: Dandelion Wine , Ray Bradbury. First time I’ve read this an adult. It’s not quite cohesive as a novel, but wallops a double-dose of nostalgia: Bradbury’s for his childhood, and mine, for reconnecting with an old beloved book. Brooklyn , by Colm Toibin. Love this simple, rich story of a young woman’s maturation-through-immigration. Caution: there is one section that will make you cry buckets of salty, sad tears. I knew when I was in the middle of this tender novel that I wished it were three times as long. It's quiet and understated and elegant, this story of a young Irish woman who comes to America and finds her own strength and self. Reminiscent of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , and an immersible world unto itself. Underworld by Don DeLillo. Epic monster of a story that seems to presuppose the horrors of the 2000s by looking at the less-but-still horrific 1950s through the 1990s.* True Grit by Charles Po...

I purposely avoid book reviews before picking up a title. Sure, I'll maybe skim the first paragraph and the last sentence of a review of a book I'm interested in to get a general feel of the reviewer's assessment--if there's a scathing cautionary conclusion ("Do not venture into this wasteland of dreck...") I might think twice . But I do not want to know much about the subject or the plot going into my private experience of reading a novel. My knowledge of a book will start and end with a past experience with the author's other works, or the 'must-read' lists that are the bread & butter of internet newspapers and magazines and blogs, and/or, finally, the tweets of enthusiasts, who might be made up of the book's publisher and friendly publicists. (It's a gorgeous little world, twitterville.) So after the mini-hype but with none of the details, I enter the discrete textual world that an author has crafted seemingly out of thin air. I gi...

(There must be spoilers...read this at your own peril of knowing too much about a novel you haven't yet read) Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs is not completely satisfying. In particular, Gate's point of view and its narrator's voice create a discord that's impossible to ignore. Tassie, the novel's narrator, is telling a story about a year in her life that begins in late 2001, where she is in college and is seeking a part time job in her college town. Obviously, the date is the setpoint from which we must infer a whole country destabilized by terrorism. But Tassie tells this story from an undefined future. We are given no sense about how much time has passed. Is it far enough removed from the events for her to have accrued wisdom, and if so, where is evidence of this wisdom the text? Is she years ahead of us here in 2009? Is the world worse off in terms of war, famine, and climate? The narrator doesn't, or won't, tell us. The worst breech of point ...