Category: Book Reviews

A book that could easily have read like a laundry list of towns and rivers is instead an adventure. Stewart comes across as one of the last of a dying breed: born in the 19th century, he projects an aura of pith helmets and wooden drawers full of collected specimens. He recaps centuries of expanding frontiers from a vantage (the first edition came out between the wars) where those frontiers had finally bumped up against oceans. The age of heady exploration and gentlemanly academic pursuit was waning. Stewart’s tone is both poetic and wistful. It imparts an engaging enthusiasm.

What does Neal Stepenson write about? Anything he damn well wants, and Anathem is his latest long-winded, exploratory romp. Why do I cut him so much slack? Because I see him as a sort of literary performance artist. It doesn’t seem as much like he writes novels as that he is doing something perverse, wonderful and occasionally downright obnoxious.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is, in fact, sad. So sad it resonates with the sadness behind it: Carson McCullers must have been sad herself. It feels too personally acquainted with sad to have been fabricated; McCullers might have been a genius but I still think she didn’t entirely make this up.

The second of two LibraryThing Early Reviewer books I’m reading and reviewing this month. Peripheral Vision will be UK author Patricia Ferguson’s first novel published in the U.S. Two of her previous novels were long-listed for the Orange Prize. The book will be available within the next few weeks from Other Press, distributed by Random [...]

This is the first of two LibraryThing Early Reviewer books I’m reading this month. Though I actually finished it second, the review was easier to write. My appreciation as always to LibraryThing and the participating publishers. Holding the book Firmin as it is now, with its novella-like thinness and its stylized bite out of the [...]

If Out Stealing Horses were to be unraveled and performed as music it would sound something like Phillip Glass: modern, haunting, impenetrable. The prose is not coy, but it is not basic, either. True to Nordic legacy, it is clean and reserved, but it becomes obvious that it’s a frozen, formal layer of ice over an emotional fjord of imponderable depth. The very paragraphs are walls that the protagonist, Trond, erects between himself and the reader. His own self-imposed isolation–he would say solitude, definitely not loneliness–is built into the sounds and shapes of the story.

There is a world in this book, a world that Eliot has wrapped up and commentated for us and handed to us for posterity. As such, a world is too much to master in a single read, and I know my careful yet single experience with this story is not enough. The world of Middlemarch is populated by characters with the complexity of planets (they have their own weather systems of cause, continents of pathos) orbited by archetypical small-town satellites (bloviators, horse traders, shrews, useless gentlefolk).

This pillar of Western literature, considered by many to be the first English novel, left me ambivalent and uncomfortable. Its antiquated mores clash with modern perspective, but not just because of quaint antiquity: Defoe’s Puritanical self-assuredness and cultural ignorance (resulting in subjugation) seem ominous in light of present-day conflicts. Is it a fun read? Sure, [...]

Unlike Homer, to whom I can lose long nights bound by his captivating cadence, Virgil’s Aeneid took me a full season–nearly six months–to finish. The tricks of the trade that were novel when I saw them in Homer lost some of their luster in Virgil’s derived forms, though there were some passages and stories here [...]

Brief, crystalline linguistic frameworks around essential, sensual experiences characterize this unusually-structured novel by Michael Ondaatje. It reads like a train of thought from start to end, drifting across space and time as they evocative memories of its characters tug at it. It’s a jolting ride sometimes, leaping unapologetically from Anna, Coop and Claire’s family on [...]