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…
Podcasts Revisited: Honorable Mentions and Updates
These are all podcasts that were either too problematic for me to recommend unreservedly or that I hadn’t listened to long enough to come to a particular opinion. In no…
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.…
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.
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…
Moby-Dick: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Canon
I’ve been hearing the advice to “toss out the canon” given to readers more and more of late (most recently in Austin Kleon’s email newsletter). While I agree that there…
Steinbeck, The Pearl, and another rant on the internet about YA lit
The Pearl is a wonderful little novella that is easily devoured in an afternoon. The prose is simple and reads quickly, but surprises with vivid and powerful metaphors. It’s a…
Wolf in White Van
Full disclosure: John Darnielle is one of my favorite living artists and the frontman of the incredibly prolific band The Mountain Goats. If you haven’t already listened to them, stop…