Books for Christmas
Books make good presents. These are what I got this year (Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The French Lieutenant's Woman are first editions). Thanks!
Powell’s Partner
(Click here to buy books!) Powell’s is a great store. As much as I love browsing brick-and-mortar used book stores, sometimes I need (or want) a particular book. Powell’s is…
Reading Log: The Unbearable Lightness of Being -Milan Kundera
Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera is a man of ideas. His essay Testaments Betrayed (an essay in 9 parts, weighing in at 280 pages) is the most conceptually dense piece of…
Reading Log: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -Tom Stoppard
I’ve seen far too few plays. Part of this has to do with where I live. I tend to default to reading them due to a lack of reasonable alternatives.…
Revising Prose, Carlin, Euphemism and the Official Style
Richard Lanham’s book Revising Prose -now in its fourth edition- has the worst cover of any book I’ve read this year. Something about living in academia goes hand-in-hands with horrible…
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
A high school class I was covering for a few days was reading this. I took a look at it after playing them a chapter of the audiobook. The voice…
Used book haul
My latest haul from Bookhounds, all between 0.75 and 1.99. Some gifts, some for me, including a back issue of The Paris Review with some interesting short stories and nonfiction.
John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist
I’m generally extremely shy about craft-based books on writing. I have yet to read Stephen King’s On Writing, and ever Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer was picked up rather…
Camus’s “The Stranger” and novels as masks for ideology
Camus’s “The Stranger” is a short and easy read, but there’s plenty to ponder. Considered purely as a novel it’s mediocre at best, but it’s a philosophical text wearing fiction…
Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors: a semi-cantankerous review
I was really disappointed by this book. Granted, I read it immediately following The Pugilist at Rest, and I feel like anything I read next would have seemed a bit…