Book Reviews from 2019

Rough subject matter (the unforgiving life of Norwegian frontier settlers), gently unfolding. Worth your time.

I like this book so much that I've bought copies for friends. Ode is a practical manual for improving one's poetic craft. The book expects you to complete exercises as you go. To not do these exercises would be to entirely miss the point. I've uploaded my silly, crappy responses to some of them my Poetry Exercises page.

I had not read any Nabokov before this book. From the first page, I knew I was in for something unique. "Wordplay" usually means puns and such, but this whole novella feels like "wordplay" in the literal sense of playing with words.

This tiny book was underwhelming, but at least it taught me some terms for kinds of metric feet, and inspired me to read some Yeats.

I've never read a memoir quite like this. The people, events, and choices that made Sung Yim's life a hell of mental illness and drug addiction also made her into someone who probably would not like me, and who I would not like to spend time with -- but I am glad to have spent a few hours absorbing her perspective.

I was introduced to JoJo through the anime adaptation, of which I've watched all of parts 2 through 5. After the part 5 anime concluded, I decided to try the manga, and found copies of part 6. While I liked many of the characters and Stands, overall I liked Stone Ocean less than the other parts with which I'm familiar.

I was skeptical about this novel's premise, but my friend Matt guaranteed I'd like it. He was right: I adored it.

1. "The novel I should most like to read at this moment," Ludmilla explains, "should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life upon you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves ..." pg 92

An excellent overview of the historical conditions that led to the Xinhai Revolution, the warlord period that followed, and the Nationalists' eventual unification of the country. Outside of explaining the larger historical context, the book focuses mainly on Sun Yat-sen and his leadership.

The only criticism I have is that I found it a bit difficult to keep the timeline straight, and I believe this is a consequence of Linebarger's decision to split the book up into conceptual sections rather than by chronology. One section will detail events up to a given time period, only for the following section to return to an earlier era.

One way for a book to earn my approval is by making me laugh out loud. Three Men in a Boat accomplished that several times.

• I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

The second book in the Pantagruel and Gargantua series, which I read first (my copy of the series placed it before Pantagruel because it's a prequel to that book.)

The introduction made me laugh hysterically, and the first several chapters made me laugh until I cried. Rabelais is a master of repetition; his most common form of joke is to describe a ludicrous number of items within a character's response, or in a description of a scene. For example, one early chapter (in my opinion, the funniest) is almost entirely taken up with an enumeration of the things that Pantagruel, a toddler of comic proportions, has used to wipe his bottom.

I've read magazine pieces by Tom Wolfe, but this is the first novel of his that I've read. Wolfe's strongest skill is capturing the every-which-way rush of ideas that the average person experiences in unsure and stressful situations. He does this with a signature style in which descriptive prose is constantly being broken up by characters' reactions and inner monologues. He's also good at writing odious characters, and at simmering both the characters' anxieties and the reader's expectations. On the other hand, his verbose style can come off cutesy, flat, and artificial once I've spent enough time trekking through it.

When I checked out this book, the library clerk said he thought the ending came too fast. Events do happen quickly in the ending sequence, but I disagree that they happen too quickly.

This is a collection of interview articles which novelist Amos Oz conducted in October and November, 1982, while writing for the newspaper Davar. The titles given in the citations are those of the articles, which are also the titles of the collection's chapters.

1. This was my master's way. He not only knew how to read the great book of nature, but also knew the way monks read the books of Scripture, and how they thought through them. pg 24-25

2. "Monasterium sine libris," the abbot recited, pensively, "est sicut civitas sine opibus, castrum sine numeris, coquina sine suppellectili, mensa sine cibis, hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis […]" pg 36

3. Then the abbot gave his benediction, the hebdomadary said the prayers, all bowed toward the altar in a moment of meditation whose sweetness no one can comprehend who has not experienced those hours of mystic ardor and intense inner peace. pg 102

Because this city, as we know, is alive with girls wholly unlike Mary Jane Reed, promising, unbroken, uncontaminated young women--healthy, in fact, as milkmaids. I know, because these were her predecessors--only they didn't satisfy, either. They were wrong, too. Spielvogel, believe me, I've been there, I've tried: I've eaten their casseroles and shaved in their johns, I've been given duplicate keys to their police locks and shelves of my own in the medicine cabinet, I have even befriended those cats of theirs--named Spinoza and Clytemnestra and Candide and Cat--yes, yes, clever and erudite girls, fresh from successful adventures in sex and scholarship at wholesome Ivy League colleges, lively, intelligent, self-respecting, self-assured, and well-behaved young women--social workers and research assistants, schoolteachers and copy readers, girls in whose company I did not feel abject or ashamed, girls I did not have to father or mother or educate or redeem. And they didn't work out, either!

pg 215

Selections from this volume kicked off my Favorite Poems page. Word list:

• rialto: n. theater district. Marketplace; exchange.
• pelf: n. wealth or riches, especially when dishonestly acquired. Frippery; rubbish; refuse; trash.
• welkin: n. firmament (the whole of the sky.)
• sursum corda: "hearts up", a phrase from the Mass
• sepulture: n. I knew the word "sepulcher" (tomb, burial place) and wondered if this was a synonym or variant spelling. It can mean the same thing as "sepulcher", but can also mean "the act of burial".
• uxorious: adj. excessively devoted to one's wife.