brian's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:08:05 -0700 60 brian's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Fever Dream 30763882
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.

Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.]]> 183 Samanta Schweblin 0399184597 brian 2 3.62 2014 Fever Dream
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: brian
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/06/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters]]> 1463380 177 Annie Dillard 0060910720 brian 3 3.77 1982 Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
author: Annie Dillard
name: brian
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/05/29
shelves:
review:

]]> The Faraway Nearby 16158561 A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story.]]> 259 Rebecca Solnit 0670025968 brian 4 4.20 2013 The Faraway Nearby
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: brian
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/05/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Breathe 56755557 A NOVEL OF LOVE AND LOSS FROM BESTSELLING AND PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES

Amid a starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape in New Mexico, a married couple from Cambridge, MA takes residency at a distinguished academic institute. When the husband is stricken with a mysterious illness, misdiagnosed at first, their lives are uprooted and husband and wife each embarks upon a nightmare journey. At thirty-seven, Michaela faces the terrifying prospect of widowhood - and the loss of Gerard, whose identity has greatly shaped her own.

In vividly depicted scenes of escalating suspense, Michaela cares desperately for Gerard in his final days as she comes to realize that her love for her husband, however fierce and selfless, is not enough to save him and that his death is beyond her comprehension. A love that refuses to be surrendered at death—is this the blessing of a unique married love, or a curse that must be exorcized?

Part intimately detailed love story, part horror story rooted in real life, BREATHE is an exploration of hauntedness rooted in the domesticity of marital love, as well as our determination both to be faithful to the beloved and to survive the trauma of loss.]]> 384 Joyce Carol Oates 006308547X brian 3 2.95 Breathe
author: Joyce Carol Oates
name: brian
average rating: 2.95
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death Comes for the Archbishop]]> 545951 297 Willa Cather 0679728899 brian 4 3.93 1927 Death Comes for the Archbishop
author: Willa Cather
name: brian
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1927
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/05/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 brian 4 4.67 2025 One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
author: Omar El Akkad
name: brian
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves:
review:

]]> S. 98110 272 John Updike 0449912124 brian 2 S is another entry in updike’s saga to try and figure the lengths people will go to fill the god-shaped hole. this one concerns a wealthy new england housewife who leaves it all for a hindu ashram in arizona.

the epistolary nature of S. causes a massive unraveling mostly b/c the man behind the curtain is just a bit too visible. updike feeds the reader exposition and subtext that the writer of the letters herself just doesn't/couldn't know. he further shoots himself in the foot b/c said writer of letters writes with such clarity, wit, and erudition (one could almost argue she writes as well as, say, john updike) it's tough to believe she'd be such a chump...

so, yeah, the novel never jumps (as does the best of updike) from the mundane to the transcendent. It kinda hovers between the mundane and the ‘kind of interesting.'

oddly enough, montambo (who loathes updike) gave this book five stars while i (who love updike) give it two. huh.]]> 3.34 1995 S.
author: John Updike
name: brian
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1995
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves:
review:
well, S is another entry in updike’s saga to try and figure the lengths people will go to fill the god-shaped hole. this one concerns a wealthy new england housewife who leaves it all for a hindu ashram in arizona.

the epistolary nature of S. causes a massive unraveling mostly b/c the man behind the curtain is just a bit too visible. updike feeds the reader exposition and subtext that the writer of the letters herself just doesn't/couldn't know. he further shoots himself in the foot b/c said writer of letters writes with such clarity, wit, and erudition (one could almost argue she writes as well as, say, john updike) it's tough to believe she'd be such a chump...

so, yeah, the novel never jumps (as does the best of updike) from the mundane to the transcendent. It kinda hovers between the mundane and the ‘kind of interesting.'

oddly enough, montambo (who loathes updike) gave this book five stars while i (who love updike) give it two. huh.
]]> Tortilla Flat 778959
As Nobel Prize winner Steinbeck chronicles their deeds—their multiple lovers, their wonderful brawls, their Rabelaisian wine-drinking—he spins a tale as compelling and ultimately as touched by sorrow as the famous legends of the Round Table, which inspired him.]]> 207 John Steinbeck 0140042407 brian 3 paisanos in his novel, he never could've written it! well, maybe he could've written but never got it published. therein lies the argument for capitalism as the best of the worst, eh?

this is one of those books, incidentally, in which characters tear through gallons of wine per drinking session. did people have higher tolerances back then? or did authors simply romanticize being drunk more?

oh. and it's also one of those books in which 'jew' is used as a verb.]]> 3.73 1935 Tortilla Flat
author: John Steinbeck
name: brian
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1935
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves:
review:
one wonders if one could do away with ambition and computers and bookface and truly be happy living day to day, sleeping in a hollow log, stealing one's dinner from pumpkin patches and bean fields, trading a day's work for a jug of cheapo wine or a roll in the hay with a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold... of course, had steinbeck truly lived the life of the paisanos in his novel, he never could've written it! well, maybe he could've written but never got it published. therein lies the argument for capitalism as the best of the worst, eh?

this is one of those books, incidentally, in which characters tear through gallons of wine per drinking session. did people have higher tolerances back then? or did authors simply romanticize being drunk more?

oh. and it's also one of those books in which 'jew' is used as a verb.
]]> The Writing Life 12530
In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.]]> 111 Annie Dillard 0060919884 brian 4 3.99 1989 The Writing Life
author: Annie Dillard
name: brian
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 12527 288 Annie Dillard 0072434171 brian 5 4.08 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
author: Annie Dillard
name: brian
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stand 228202 1141 Stephen King 0451169530 brian 4 4.32 1978 The Stand
author: Stephen King
name: brian
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End]]> 20696006 In Being Mortal, author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.]]> 282 Atul Gawande 0805095152 brian 5 4.47 2014 Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
author: Atul Gawande
name: brian
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> In Patagonia 79909 199 Bruce Chatwin 0142437190 brian 3 3.69 1977 In Patagonia
author: Bruce Chatwin
name: brian
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> The Wallcreeper 22237292 193 Nell Zink 0989760715 brian 2 3.33 2014 The Wallcreeper
author: Nell Zink
name: brian
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4) 52842705 is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world's in meltdown - and the real meltdown hasn't even started yet.

In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they're living on borrowed time.

This is a story about people on the brink of change. They're family, but they think they're strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they've got nothing in common have in common?

Summer.]]> 384 Ali Smith 0241207061 brian 4 4.04 2020 Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)
author: Ali Smith
name: brian
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Stone Yard Devotional 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia's most acclaimed and best loved writers.

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood brian 3 3.72 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: brian
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Spring (Seasonal Quartet, #3) 40545817 336 Ali Smith 0241207053 brian 3 4.07 2019 Spring (Seasonal Quartet, #3)
author: Ali Smith
name: brian
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Winter (Seasonal, #2) 34516974 The dazzling second novel in Ali Smith’s essential Seasonal Quartet—from the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be Both.

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer’s leaves? Dead litter.

The world shrinks; the sap sinks.
But winter makes things visible. And if there’s ice, there’ll be fire.

In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.

It’s the season that teaches us survival.
Here comes Winter.]]> 322 Ali Smith 0241207029 brian 3 3.80 2017 Winter (Seasonal, #2)
author: Ali Smith
name: brian
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Catch a Fire: The Blaze and Bust of the Canadian Cannabis Industry]]> 210533998 328 Ben Kaplan 1459754654 brian 4 3.71 Catch a Fire: The Blaze and Bust of the Canadian Cannabis Industry
author: Ben Kaplan
name: brian
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business]]> 386364 184 Neil Postman 0140094385 brian 4 4.14 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
author: Neil Postman
name: brian
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation]]> 1056805 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was rediscovered only two hundred years ago and published for the first time in 1839. One of the earliest great stories of English literature after Beowulf, the poem narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager.

The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike castle, a dire challenge answered - and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.

Following in the tradition of Ted Hughes, Marie Boroff, and J. R. R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage, one of England's leading poets, has produced an inventive translation of this Arthurian epic that resounds with both clarity and verve. As England's Sunday Telegraph wrote, "Armitage's animated translation is to be welcomed for helping to liberate Gawain from academia, as Seamus Heaney did in 1999 for Beowulf." His work, presented here with facing original text and a note on the text by Harvard scholar James Simpson, is meticulously responsible to the sophistication of the original - but responds equally to its own powerfully persuasive ambition to be read as a totally new poem. It is as if two poets, six hundred years apart, set out on a journey through the same mesmerizing landscapes - acoustic, physical, and metaphorical -in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true and long-awaited translator.]]> 198 Simon Armitage 0393060489 brian 4 3.98 1375 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation
author: Simon Armitage
name: brian
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1375
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> The Armies 6469553 profesor, is a retired teacher in a small Colombian town where he passes the days pretending to pick oranges while spying on his neighbor Geraldina as she lies naked in the shade of a ceiba tree on a red floral quilt. The garden burns with sunlight; the macaws laugh sweetly.

Otilia, Ismail's wife, is ashamed of his peeping and suggests that he pay a visit to Father Albornoz. Instead, Ismail wanders the town visiting old friends, plagued by a tangle of secret memories. "Where have I existed these years? I answer myself; up on the wall, peering over."

When the armies slowly arrive, the profesor's reveries are gradually taken over by a living hell. His wife disappears and he must find her. We learn that not only gentle, grassy hillsides surround San Joseacute; but landmines and coca fields. The reader is soon engulfed by the violence of Rosero's narrative that is touched not only with a deep sadness, but an extraordinary tenderness.

]]> 208 Evelio Rosero 0811218643 brian 4 New Directions founded in 1936 by poet/critic john laughlin when ezra pound urged him to do 'something useful'. a list of only a handful of writers published by new directions:

sherwood anderson
djuna barnes
lawrence ferlinghetti
john hawkes
william carlos williams
cesar aira
roberto bolano
jorge luis borges
evelio rosero
julio cortzar
pablo neruda
octavio paz
anne carson
james joyce
dylan thomas
guillaume apollinaire
celine
jean cocteau
herman hesse
alexander kluge
frederico garcia lorca
stephane mallarme
javier marias
w.g. sebald
raymond queneau
leonid tsypkin
robert walser

yeah -- and up next year is walser's microscripts. sure to be the book of 2010.
call me optimistic but there are too many of us -- too many crazy booknerds; too many of us like burgess meredith in that terrific episode of the twilight zone; too many of us who can't wait to have to crap so we have a few minutes alone to read; too many of us who read at red lights, in the supermarket line, at the bar, at the restaurant, at the coffee shop, under a tree, in cellars, bedrooms, basements, attics; too many of us who get hard/wet by that used bookstore smell, by nice thick pages, dark ink, soulful cover design, by the names of our favorite writers written down, by the sound of said names when spoken; too many of us who obsessively prune our bookshelves, our collections, our 'want' lists -- that all the kindles and amazons and dan browns and megachains and all that other shit might try and push us further underground... but we're fucking cockroaches. we ain't going nowhere.




]]> 4.07 2007 The Armies
author: Evelio Rosero
name: brian
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
let us now praise New Directions founded in 1936 by poet/critic john laughlin when ezra pound urged him to do 'something useful'. a list of only a handful of writers published by new directions:

sherwood anderson
djuna barnes
lawrence ferlinghetti
john hawkes
william carlos williams
cesar aira
roberto bolano
jorge luis borges
evelio rosero
julio cortzar
pablo neruda
octavio paz
anne carson
james joyce
dylan thomas
guillaume apollinaire
celine
jean cocteau
herman hesse
alexander kluge
frederico garcia lorca
stephane mallarme
javier marias
w.g. sebald
raymond queneau
leonid tsypkin
robert walser

yeah -- and up next year is walser's microscripts. sure to be the book of 2010.
call me optimistic but there are too many of us -- too many crazy booknerds; too many of us like burgess meredith in that terrific episode of the twilight zone; too many of us who can't wait to have to crap so we have a few minutes alone to read; too many of us who read at red lights, in the supermarket line, at the bar, at the restaurant, at the coffee shop, under a tree, in cellars, bedrooms, basements, attics; too many of us who get hard/wet by that used bookstore smell, by nice thick pages, dark ink, soulful cover design, by the names of our favorite writers written down, by the sound of said names when spoken; too many of us who obsessively prune our bookshelves, our collections, our 'want' lists -- that all the kindles and amazons and dan browns and megachains and all that other shit might try and push us further underground... but we're fucking cockroaches. we ain't going nowhere.





]]> Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1) 28446947 Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Here comes Autumn.]]> 264 Ali Smith 0241207002 brian 4 3.67 2016 Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1)
author: Ali Smith
name: brian
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Memorial Days 212806569 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of�Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz � just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy � collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways those of other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 059365398X brian 4 4.31 2025 Memorial Days
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: brian
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories]]> 2282 162 Truman Capote 067960085X brian 2 3.87 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories
author: Truman Capote
name: brian
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1958
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Heaven and Hell (Heaven and Hell Trilogy #1)]]> 36446996
The extreme hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence to him - he has already resolved to join his friend in death. But once in the town he immerses himself in the stories and lives of its inhabitants, and decides that he cannot be with his friend just yet.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Heaven and Hell is a perfectly formed, vivid and timeless story, lyrical in style, and as intense a reading experience as the forces of the Icelandic landscape themselves. An outstandingly moving novel.]]> 225 Jón Kalman Stefánsson brian 2 4.30 2007 Heaven and Hell (Heaven and Hell Trilogy #1)
author: Jón Kalman Stefánsson
name: brian
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island]]> 55197188 The untold story of how one tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic has shaped the world for centuries.

The history of Iceland began 1,200 years ago, when a frustrated Viking captain and his useless navigator ran aground in the middle of the North Atlantic. Suddenly, the island was no longer just a layover for the Arctic tern. Instead, it became a nation whose diplomats and musicians, sailors and soldiers, volcanoes and flowers, quietly altered the globe forever. How Iceland Changed the World takes readers on a tour of history, showing them how Iceland played a pivotal role in events as diverse as the French Revolution, the Moon Landing, and the foundation of Israel. Again and again, one humble nation has found itself at the frontline of historic events, shaping the world as we know it, How Iceland Changed the World paints a lively picture of just how it all happened.]]> 288 Egill Bjarnason 0143135880 brian 4 4.08 2021 How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island
author: Egill Bjarnason
name: brian
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Jar City (Inspector Erlendur, #3)]]> 280366
As the team of detectives reopen this very cold case, Inspector Erlendur uncovers secrets that are much larger than the murder of one old man--secrets that have been carefully guarded by many people for many years. As he follows a fascinating trail of unusual forensic evidence, Erlendur also confronts stubborn personal conflicts that reveal his own depth and complexity of character.]]> 275 Arnaldur Indriðason 0312340702 brian 2 3.83 2000 Jar City (Inspector Erlendur, #3)
author: Arnaldur Indriðason
name: brian
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Stoner 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 292 John Williams 1590171993 brian 4 4.36 1965 Stoner
author: John Williams
name: brian
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Zero Hour 277564 126 Kristjana Gunnars 0889950644 brian 3 4.18 1993 Zero Hour
author: Kristjana Gunnars
name: brian
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank]]> 12233866
The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown� vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows� is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills� chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show� and “How We Avenged the Blums� wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side� is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.

Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.]]> 207 Nathan Englander 0307958701 brian 3 3.74 2012 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
author: Nathan Englander
name: brian
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 brian 4 4.21 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: brian
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 brian 4 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: brian
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 brian 4 3.85 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: brian
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Holy the Firm 7695 76 Annie Dillard 0060915439 brian 4 4.23 1977 Holy the Firm
author: Annie Dillard
name: brian
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas]]> 55244640
Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.

]]> 200 Robert Zaretsky 022654933X brian 3 3.99 The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
author: Robert Zaretsky
name: brian
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Mysticism 203613915 A probing, inspiring exploration of mysticism not as religious practice but as a mode of experience and way of life by one of the most provactive philosophical thinkers of our time.Why mysticism? Evelyn Underhill defined mysticism as “experience in its most intense form,� and in his new book the philosopher Simon Critchley poses a simple question to the Wouldn’t you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness, both your life and those of the creatures that surround you? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.Mysticism is not primarily a theoretical issue. It's not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. A rough and ready definition of mysticism is that it is a way of systematically freeing yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. Mysticism is the practical possibility of the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence.This is a book about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever be fully lost. It is also book about Julian of Norwich, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and T. S. Eliot, and how writing and poetry can help to show us the way there. It is a book full of learning, puzzlement, pleasure, and wonder. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life. Mysticism as start now.]]> 336 Simon Critchley 1681378248 brian 3 3.76 Mysticism
author: Simon Critchley
name: brian
average rating: 3.76
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Third Realm (Morgenstjernen, #3)]]> 204640602 From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses between light and dark that live in all of us

Shapeshifting visitors, unsolved murders in the forest, black metal bands, and an online bank of thousands of people’s dreams—the star is back. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star kept readers up all night, immersed with nine characters whose individual lives are heightened by the sudden appearance of a blazing new star, and The Wolves of Eternity portrayed the intimate experiences of two estranged half-siblings decades before the star rises. In The Third Realm, the effects of the star are felt around the world, as people start to reckon with what it might possibly mean.

With this next novel, the limitless scale and ambition of Knausgaard’s new universe are clear. This is life, death, the human condition, and the real-time creation of an epic and utterly immersive world.]]> 512 Karl Ove Knausgård 0593655214 brian 4 4.30 2022 The Third Realm (Morgenstjernen, #3)
author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: brian
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Dear Dickhead 205363943 The French novel taking the world by an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.

Dear Dickhead, I read the piece you posted on your Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. you've had your fifteen minutes of fame. The proof? The fact that I bothered to write to you. Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city—Paris—where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book.]]> 304 Virginie Despentes 0374611610 brian 4 3.62 2022 Dear Dickhead
author: Virginie Despentes
name: brian
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Orbital 123136728
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 brian 3 3.53 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: brian
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Season of the Swamp 205363990
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.]]> 160 Yuri Herrera 164445307X brian 2 3.60 2022 Season of the Swamp
author: Yuri Herrera
name: brian
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Torah: The Five Books of Moses]]> 821535 394 Anonymous 0827600151 brian 4 4.10 -500 The Torah: The Five Books of Moses
author: Anonymous
name: brian
average rating: 4.10
book published: -500
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 brian 3 3.84 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: brian
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Conversations with Friends 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 brian 4 3.74 2017 Conversations with Friends
author: Sally Rooney
name: brian
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Vernon Subutex 3 54785551 Paris may burn, the world may crumble, but Vernon Subutex shall reign supreme! � The final installation of writer/filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s Man Booker International Prize shortlisted punk-rock trilogy.

As storm clouds gather, portending a final reckoning, ersatz rave-cult leader Vernon Subutex decides to return to Paris. Even if it means leaving behind his disciples. He has to. He’s got a dentist’s appointment.

Back in the city, he learns that an old friend from his days homeless on the Paris streets has died and left him half of a lottery win. But when Vernon returns to his commune with news of this windfall, it’s not long before his disciples turn on each other. Such good fortune does not accord with the principles Vernon has handed down.

Meanwhile, the monstrous film producer Laurent Dopalet is determined to make Aïcha and Céleste pay for their attack on him, whatever it takes and whoever gets hurt. And, before long, the whole of Paris will be reeling in the wake of the terrorist atrocities of 2015 and 2016, and all the characters in this kaleidoscopic portrait of a city and era will be forced to confront one another one last time. In the wake of all this chaos and hate, the question will rise again: After all he’s been through, who is Vernon Subutex? And the answer: He is the future.

Virginie Despentes’s epochal trilogy ends here—in fire, blood, and even forgiveness. But not everyone will survive to see the dawning of the golden age of Subutex.]]> 384 Virginie Despentes 0374283265 brian 3 3.92 2017 Vernon Subutex 3
author: Virginie Despentes
name: brian
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Vernon Subutex 2 51542126 Part social epic, part punk-rock thriller, writer/filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy continues the Man Booker International Prize shortlisted sprawling tale of an ex-record shop clerk’s celebrity fortunes and misfortunes.

Rock star Alex Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It’s a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench. He has tapes of Alex that will shake the world. The hunt is on, and the wolves are closing in.

Meanwhile, the cast of lovers and killers in Vernon’s orbit is in violent disarray. Aïcha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, the porn star Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Céleste thinks of her plan. Céleste wants Aïcha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex’s gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Anaïs, her boss’s assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him.

Big-shot producer Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT.]]> 368 Virginie Despentes 0374283257 brian 4 4.05 2015 Vernon Subutex 2
author: Virginie Despentes
name: brian
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Vernon Subutex 1 (Vernon Subutex, #1)]]> 43565353 A "rock and roll Zola" short-listed for the International Man Booker Prize, a European bestseller, and the basis of a big-budget TV series

From the provocative writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes comes volume one of her acclaimed trilogy of novels, Vernon Subutex--short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize. But who is Vernon Subutex?

Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Paris, where his name was legend throughout Paris. By the 2000s, however, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CD and vinyl sales, his shop is struggling, like so many others. When it closes, Subutex finds himself with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Before long, his savings are gone, and when the mysterious rock star who had been covering his rent suddenly drops dead of a drug overdose, Subutex finds himself launched on an epic saga of couch-surfing, boozing, and coke-snorting before finally winding up homeless. Just as he resigns himself to life as a panhandler, a throwaway comment he once made on Facebook takes the internet by storm.

The word is out: Subutex is lugging around a bunch of VHS tapes shot by that same dead rock musician--his last recordings on this earth. Soon a crowd of wild characters, from screen writers to social media groupies, from porn stars to failed musicians to random misfits, are hot on Vernon's trail . . . but Vernon is none the wiser.]]> 352 Virginie Despentes 0374283249 brian 4 3.95 2015 Vernon Subutex 1 (Vernon Subutex, #1)
author: Virginie Despentes
name: brian
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 brian 3 4.14 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: brian
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Frisk 856165 128 Dennis Cooper 0802132898 brian 4 3.67 1991 Frisk
author: Dennis Cooper
name: brian
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Under the Dome 6320534
When food, electricity and water run short, the normal rules of society are changed. A new and more sinister social order develops, Dale Barbara, a young Iraq veteran, teams up with a handful of intrepid citizens to fight against the corruption that is sweeping through the town and to try to discover the source of the Dome before it is too late...]]> 1074 Stephen King 1439148503 brian 3 max payne the gloomy hero is, of course, offered casual sex by this woman:



aware that payne is mourning the murder of his wife she says something to the effect that he can call out his wife's name as he fucks her. ok. now this utterly bland piece-of-shit movie is getting kinda interesting, there's some potential complexity here, some fun with the old eros/thanos.
of course payne tosses her out, all offended at the very notion. in movies like this you can't have your hero engaging in any kinda deviancy.

well, there's a bunch of that shit going on in under the dome, in which the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad (i mean reeeeaaaaal bad. like gang-rape bad, kill-your-own-son bad, mass-murderer bad). and it's a shame b/c there's much to love about this novel. but king's view of human beings and human behavior in this one is kinda narrow and uninteresting--strange from a guy with such a fertile imagination for the fantastic. what's most frustrating is that when you're dealing with common folk it's most fun to throw 'em in extreme situations and watch them crack. we've seen it all over Apocalit*: lord of the flies, blindness, the road, etc� and this is the part i don't get: the characters that crack when the dome comes down ARE ALREADY ASSHOLES! what's fun about this shit is watching the slow burn of a decent or sane character as they descend into evil or lunacy. it's kinda obvious what's gonna happen when dick cheney is tossed into No Exit, ain't it? king's bad guys were bad before the dome and once the shit comes down they kill and gang-rape with no fore or afterthought. how the shit is this interesting? what's great about murder in serious works of art (and make no mistake: this novel means to be a serious work of art) is not the murder itself but all which surrounds it.

human existence is kaleidoscopically demented and deranged and far weirder than it appears on the surface. the most normal & upstanding of us are revealed to be sucking random cock in airport bathrooms, talking to snakes or burning bushes or interplanetary beneficiaries, etc� in short, i appreciate people like david lynch not in that he offers an alternative to the humdrum of daily existence but that he throws to the forefront what is actually happening behind closed doors; i reject Under the Dome's view of the world in that it lacks moral complexity, it lacks the true stink of human existence. blue velvet is heightened for sure, but it reveals what small town americana feels like. edward hopper to king's norman rockwell.

the good? gobs of it. what king might lack in his basic presentation of human behavior he almost makes up for in his evocation of a kind of horrible and ineffable beauty. amidst this mash-up of sci-fi & political allegory there are scenes of true beauty and a kind of gritty poetry as the town descends into a Hobbesian nightmare. one that sticks out: as pollutants and dust and pollen collect on the roof of the invisible dome, the townspeoples' view of the sky is skewed, the sky itself appears... different. sunsets seem as when a volcano explodes, a deep rich burning red. and the night sky? a meteor shower appears as streams of pink and red slashing the sky to bits. and minus the 'leatherhead' parts, the final 'fireball and survivor' sequence haunted the hell outta me. some seriously horrifying stuff.]]> 3.92 2009 Under the Dome
author: Stephen King
name: brian
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:
in the 2008 film max payne the gloomy hero is, of course, offered casual sex by this woman:



aware that payne is mourning the murder of his wife she says something to the effect that he can call out his wife's name as he fucks her. ok. now this utterly bland piece-of-shit movie is getting kinda interesting, there's some potential complexity here, some fun with the old eros/thanos.
of course payne tosses her out, all offended at the very notion. in movies like this you can't have your hero engaging in any kinda deviancy.

well, there's a bunch of that shit going on in under the dome, in which the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad (i mean reeeeaaaaal bad. like gang-rape bad, kill-your-own-son bad, mass-murderer bad). and it's a shame b/c there's much to love about this novel. but king's view of human beings and human behavior in this one is kinda narrow and uninteresting--strange from a guy with such a fertile imagination for the fantastic. what's most frustrating is that when you're dealing with common folk it's most fun to throw 'em in extreme situations and watch them crack. we've seen it all over Apocalit*: lord of the flies, blindness, the road, etc� and this is the part i don't get: the characters that crack when the dome comes down ARE ALREADY ASSHOLES! what's fun about this shit is watching the slow burn of a decent or sane character as they descend into evil or lunacy. it's kinda obvious what's gonna happen when dick cheney is tossed into No Exit, ain't it? king's bad guys were bad before the dome and once the shit comes down they kill and gang-rape with no fore or afterthought. how the shit is this interesting? what's great about murder in serious works of art (and make no mistake: this novel means to be a serious work of art) is not the murder itself but all which surrounds it.

human existence is kaleidoscopically demented and deranged and far weirder than it appears on the surface. the most normal & upstanding of us are revealed to be sucking random cock in airport bathrooms, talking to snakes or burning bushes or interplanetary beneficiaries, etc� in short, i appreciate people like david lynch not in that he offers an alternative to the humdrum of daily existence but that he throws to the forefront what is actually happening behind closed doors; i reject Under the Dome's view of the world in that it lacks moral complexity, it lacks the true stink of human existence. blue velvet is heightened for sure, but it reveals what small town americana feels like. edward hopper to king's norman rockwell.

the good? gobs of it. what king might lack in his basic presentation of human behavior he almost makes up for in his evocation of a kind of horrible and ineffable beauty. amidst this mash-up of sci-fi & political allegory there are scenes of true beauty and a kind of gritty poetry as the town descends into a Hobbesian nightmare. one that sticks out: as pollutants and dust and pollen collect on the roof of the invisible dome, the townspeoples' view of the sky is skewed, the sky itself appears... different. sunsets seem as when a volcano explodes, a deep rich burning red. and the night sky? a meteor shower appears as streams of pink and red slashing the sky to bits. and minus the 'leatherhead' parts, the final 'fireball and survivor' sequence haunted the hell outta me. some seriously horrifying stuff.
]]> The Storyteller 53931 ]]> 245 Mario Vargas Llosa 0312420285 brian 3 feast of the goat and war of the end of the world vargas llosa lays down the evil and stupidity and fanaticism that finds its permanent residence in the human heart. similarly, the storyteller probes deep into questions of 'civilization' while wisely refusing to answer any of 'em� the book falters along the way and feels somewhat unfinished, but definitely of interest.

gonna start my own political party of which i am the only member: a kind of nihilist/anarchist/humanist/fascist/far-left/far-right lunatic. morons who believe we can unring the bell of technology brutality and violence are useless; worse is the faux-provinicialism might-makes-rightism of the bomb-the-bad-guys jackasses.

the horror... the horror...
heh heh. ]]> 3.74 1987 The Storyteller
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: brian
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2009/12/11
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves:
review:
i spend much time creating my own right-to-exist argument for modern civilization. can anything justify the horrors we've inflicted on the globe, on one another, on the animals? doubt it. but nobody is better. ain't no noble savage. ain't nothing. just the least of all evils. and we might be it. pathetic, huh? in feast of the goat and war of the end of the world vargas llosa lays down the evil and stupidity and fanaticism that finds its permanent residence in the human heart. similarly, the storyteller probes deep into questions of 'civilization' while wisely refusing to answer any of 'em� the book falters along the way and feels somewhat unfinished, but definitely of interest.

gonna start my own political party of which i am the only member: a kind of nihilist/anarchist/humanist/fascist/far-left/far-right lunatic. morons who believe we can unring the bell of technology brutality and violence are useless; worse is the faux-provinicialism might-makes-rightism of the bomb-the-bad-guys jackasses.

the horror... the horror...
heh heh.
]]> State of Paradise 195790688 A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida’s underbelly, from a reality-warping storyteller.

Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern—something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.

During a violent rainstorm, the writer’s sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.]]> 224 Laura van den Berg 037461220X brian 3 3.40 2024 State of Paradise
author: Laura van den Berg
name: brian
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:

]]> My Tender Matador 638335 176 Pedro Lemebel 0802141870 brian 3 4.34 2001 My Tender Matador
author: Pedro Lemebel
name: brian
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Bhagavad Gita 99945 Mahabharata incorporates Bhagavad-Gita, a sacred Hindu text that takes the form of a philosophical dialogue in which Krishna instructs Arjuna, the prince, in ethical matters and the nature of God.

Krishna expounds the nature and the way that humans can come to know God to Arjuna, the warrior prince in the Bhagavad-Gita.

Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic, contains the text of the Bhagavad-Gita.

This early epic poem recounts the conversation between the warrior and his charioteer, the divine manifestation. It sets out the important lessons to learn to change the outcome of the war in the moments before a great battle that the warrior fights, and culminates in revealing the true cosmic warrior and counselling him to search for the universal perfection of life. This most important work ranges from yoga postures to dense moral discussion and serves as a practical guide to living well.]]> 224 Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa 0609810340 brian 3 4.27 -400 Bhagavad Gita
author: Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
name: brian
average rating: 4.27
book published: -400
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Sula 11346 174 Toni Morrison 0452283868 brian 3



despite that weird author hand placement thing i've been seriously obsessing over all these author photos of morrison's huge lion's head on the back of the her books--i look for some external indication of all the furious demented & psychotic shit on the inside but by all appearances she's a lovely woman. it's gotten to the point where i've gotta stick duct tape over the author photo so that everytime i read some crazyass shit and my OCD flares up i can't flip to the back cover to stare some more.





again with the hands.


]]> 4.05 1973 Sula
author: Toni Morrison
name: brian
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1973
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:





despite that weird author hand placement thing i've been seriously obsessing over all these author photos of morrison's huge lion's head on the back of the her books--i look for some external indication of all the furious demented & psychotic shit on the inside but by all appearances she's a lovely woman. it's gotten to the point where i've gotta stick duct tape over the author photo so that everytime i read some crazyass shit and my OCD flares up i can't flip to the back cover to stare some more.





again with the hands.



]]> <![CDATA[I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories]]> 51540889 An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg's first story collection since her acclaimed and prizewinning Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and mind like rotten, fragrant fruit. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg's trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Spain, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the thoughts we reveal to no one but ourselves.

In "Lizards," a man mutes his wife's anxieties by giving her a La Croix-like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and violent consequences, while in "Karolina," a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what's left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too close. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of "Slumberland," "that border between magic and annihilation," and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.]]> 224 Laura van den Berg 0374102090 brian 4 3.80 2020 I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
author: Laura van den Berg
name: brian
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves:
review:

]]> The Left Hand of Darkness 118028 See alternate cover editions here and here.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science fiction—winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants� gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]> 366 Ursula K. Le Guin 0441478123 brian 5 4.07 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: brian
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 2666 63032 1128 Roberto Bolaño 843396867X brian 4 no spoilers. just here to make three points:

1) the blood and guts
2) the disaster
3) the women

1) y’know that bookbuzz when you’re walking around the world and it’s all colored with the life of the book you’re reading? 894 pages of bolano’s epic and i feel like the guy in that 50s sci-fi movie who gets shrunk down real small except this time i'm injected into someone’s bodybook; i’m in there all flapping around amongst the blood and guts and bones and bile and brains of this unwieldy thing.
i love these big sprawling novels that can't be reduced to a single theme, or even a few themes. 2666 is shot through with so many goddamn ideas, is so all over the place, so sloppy and strange, with temporal and geographical shifts, recurring images and motifs, characters and names -- and just the furthest thing from any kind of recognizable or coherent epic. bolano’s not pushing the snowball down the hill, watching it gain in mass and volume; he’s drunkenly tossed a million little snowballs down there and, yeah, some are substantive and gain in size, get bigger as they go, but others flatten out and disappear or pop into snowdust...

2) godard complained while watching visconti’s Senso that he was more interested in what happened after the fadeout then in the scene itself. in response he shot Pierrot le Fou a film smashed in with all the stuff surrounding what other narrative artists consider ‘story' -- 2666 is a mad collage of befores and afters, a high-velocity mishmash of the irrelevant and irreverent, and, truth be told something of a disaster. yeah. and it’s also the most compelling thing i’ve read in a long time.

from 2666:

“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick� What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.�

this is bolano engaged in serious fucking combat, infinitely more interesting than an author perched at her desk all ready to notecard out a prose-perfect streamlined classy piece of work. boo!

3) at the core of 2666 is a fictional retelling of the ‘female murders� of juarez. along with descriptions of the serial murders are included descriptions of women murdered not by the killer(s), but by boyfriends and husbands and fathers and sons and johns. what matters, what’s actually happening over there on a sociocultural level is infinitely more horrifying than a serial killer or mass murderer � the women of juarez are being physically treated as they’ve been spiritually and symbolically regarded for a long time. the murders, and the fact that they continue, that this isn’t treated as a national emergency, well, it's only logical: the madonna is home, she’s safe, virginal, taken care of and taking care of. the ones who are murdered, well, they're the Whore, no? (don't ask how the Madonna is possibly supposed to survive in a broken post-NAFTA society) the women of juarez are hated and feared--the men fear the women. and the murders mean more than murder. well, this ain’t the forum for this kinda thing and i certainly don’t wanna get all serious on y’all. but check this book out if you’re interested...



and read 2666. i don’t yet know if it’s a ‘great� book. but I know i read it two weeks ago and i can’t stop thinking about it.]]> 4.22 2004 2666
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: brian
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves:
review:
the english version comes out in november.
no spoilers. just here to make three points:

1) the blood and guts
2) the disaster
3) the women

1) y’know that bookbuzz when you’re walking around the world and it’s all colored with the life of the book you’re reading? 894 pages of bolano’s epic and i feel like the guy in that 50s sci-fi movie who gets shrunk down real small except this time i'm injected into someone’s bodybook; i’m in there all flapping around amongst the blood and guts and bones and bile and brains of this unwieldy thing.
i love these big sprawling novels that can't be reduced to a single theme, or even a few themes. 2666 is shot through with so many goddamn ideas, is so all over the place, so sloppy and strange, with temporal and geographical shifts, recurring images and motifs, characters and names -- and just the furthest thing from any kind of recognizable or coherent epic. bolano’s not pushing the snowball down the hill, watching it gain in mass and volume; he’s drunkenly tossed a million little snowballs down there and, yeah, some are substantive and gain in size, get bigger as they go, but others flatten out and disappear or pop into snowdust...

2) godard complained while watching visconti’s Senso that he was more interested in what happened after the fadeout then in the scene itself. in response he shot Pierrot le Fou a film smashed in with all the stuff surrounding what other narrative artists consider ‘story' -- 2666 is a mad collage of befores and afters, a high-velocity mishmash of the irrelevant and irreverent, and, truth be told something of a disaster. yeah. and it’s also the most compelling thing i’ve read in a long time.

from 2666:

“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick� What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.�

this is bolano engaged in serious fucking combat, infinitely more interesting than an author perched at her desk all ready to notecard out a prose-perfect streamlined classy piece of work. boo!

3) at the core of 2666 is a fictional retelling of the ‘female murders� of juarez. along with descriptions of the serial murders are included descriptions of women murdered not by the killer(s), but by boyfriends and husbands and fathers and sons and johns. what matters, what’s actually happening over there on a sociocultural level is infinitely more horrifying than a serial killer or mass murderer � the women of juarez are being physically treated as they’ve been spiritually and symbolically regarded for a long time. the murders, and the fact that they continue, that this isn’t treated as a national emergency, well, it's only logical: the madonna is home, she’s safe, virginal, taken care of and taking care of. the ones who are murdered, well, they're the Whore, no? (don't ask how the Madonna is possibly supposed to survive in a broken post-NAFTA society) the women of juarez are hated and feared--the men fear the women. and the murders mean more than murder. well, this ain’t the forum for this kinda thing and i certainly don’t wanna get all serious on y’all. but check this book out if you’re interested...



and read 2666. i don’t yet know if it’s a ‘great� book. but I know i read it two weeks ago and i can’t stop thinking about it.
]]> Reading Genesis 127282468
For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents, by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture. Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis , which includes the original text, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.]]> 344 Marilynne Robinson 0374299404 brian 3 4.03 2024 Reading Genesis
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: brian
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker]]> 54890
“Advance word on Con Air said that it was all about an airplane with an unusually dangerous and potentially lethal load. Big deal. You should try the lunches they serve out of Newark. Compared with the chicken napalm I ate on my last flight, the men in Con Air are about as dangerous as balloons.�

Anthony Lane on The Bridges of Madison County �

“I got my copy at the airport, behind a guy who was buying Playboy’s Book of Lingerie , and I think he had the better deal. He certainly looked happy with his purchase, whereas I had to ask for a paper bag.�

Anthony Lane on Martha Stewart�

“Super-skilled, free of fear, the last word in human efficiency, Martha Stewart is the woman who convinced a million Americans that they have the time, the means, the right, and—damn it—the duty to pipe a little squirt of soft cheese into the middle of a snow pea, and to continue piping until there are ‘fifty to sixty� stuffed peas raring to go.�

For ten years, Anthony Lane has delighted New Yorker readers with his film reviews, book reviews, and profiles that range from Buster Keaton to Vladimir Nabokov to Ernest Shackleton. Nobody’s Perfect is an unforgettable collection of Lane’s trademark wit, satire, and insight that will satisfy both the long addicted and the not so familiar.]]> 784 Anthony Lane 0375714340 brian 1 4.14 2002 Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker
author: Anthony Lane
name: brian
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2002
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves:
review:
this smarmy jackass writes as if he considers himself a wit equal to that of waugh or wodehouse. piss off you unfunny waughnabe. unfortunate that he holds the job that pauline kael once held. she could be infuriating, stubborn, and wrong but man oh man did she love movies. and laid her ass on the line in defense (or offense) of one. lane doesn't put his shit out there.
]]> <![CDATA[Planes Flying over a Monster: Essays]]> 205673378 From one of Mexico’s most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselvesIn ten intimate essays, Daniel Saldaña París explores the cities he has lived in, each one home to a new iteration of himself. In Mexico City he’s a young poet eager to prove himself. In Montreal—an opioid addict desperate for relief. In Madrid—a lonely student seeking pleasure in grotesque extremes. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth?Saldaña París turns to literature and film, poetry and philosophy for answers.The result is a hybrid of memoir and criticism, "asensory work, full of soundscapes, filth, planes, closed spaces, open vastness" (El País).]]> 224 Daniel Saldaña París 1646222318 brian 3 3.57 2021 Planes Flying over a Monster: Essays
author: Daniel Saldaña París
name: brian
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves:
review:

]]> The Kingdom 34930849 Cette histoire, portée par Emmanuel Carrère, devient une fresque où se recrée le monde méditerranéen d’alors, agité de soubresauts politiques et religieux intenses sous le couvercle trompeur de la pax romana. C’est une évocation tumultueuse, pleine de rebondissements et de péripéties, de personnages hauts en couleur.
Mais Le Royaume c’est aussi, habilement tissée dans la trame historique, une méditation sur ce que c’est que le christianisme, en quoi il nous interroge encore aujourd’hui, en quoi il nous concerne, croyants ou incroyants, comment l’invraisemblable renversement des valeurs qu’il propose (les premiers seront les derniers, etc.) a pu connaître ce succès puis cette postérité. Ce qu’il faut savoir aussi, c’est que cette réflexion est constamment menée dans le respect et une certaine forme d’amitié pour les acteurs de cette étonnante histoire, acteurs passés, acteurs présents, et que cela lui donne une dimension profondément humaine.
Respect, amitié qu’Emmanuel Carrère dit aussi éprouver pour celui qu’il a été, lui, il y a quelque temps. Car, comme toujours dans chacun de ses livres, depuis L’Adversaire, l’engagement de l’auteur dans ce qu’il raconte est entier. Pendant trois ans, il y a 25 ans, Emmanuel Carrère a été un chrétien fervent, catholique pratiquant, on pourrait presque dire : avec excès. Il raconte aussi, en arrière-plan de la grande Histoire, son histoire à lui, les tourments qu’il traversait alors et comment la religion fut un temps un havre, ou une fuite. Et si, aujourd’hui, il n’est plus croyant, il garde la volonté d’interroger cette croyance, d’enquêter sur ce qu’il fut, ne s’épargnant pas, ne cachant rien de qui il est, avec cette brutale franchise, cette totale absence d’autocensure qu’on lui connaît.
Il faut aussi évoquer la manière si particulière qu’a Emmanuel Carrère d’écrire cette histoire. D’abord l’abondance et la qualité de la documentation qui en font un livre où on apprend des choses, beaucoup de choses. Ensuite, cette tonalité si particulière qui, s’appuyant sur la fluidité d’une écriture certaine, passe dans un même mouvement de la familiarité à la gravité, ne se prive d’aucun ressort ni d’aucun registre, pouvant ainsi mêler la réflexion sur le point de vue de Luc au souvenir d’une vidéo porno, l’évocation de la crise mystique qu’a connu l’auteur et les problèmes de gardes de ses enfants (avec, il faut dire, une baby-sitter américaine familière de Philip K. Dick�).
Le Royaume est un livre ample, drôle et grave, mouvementé et intérieur, érudit et trivial, total.]]> 400 Emmanuel Carrère 125015944X brian 4 3.94 2014 The Kingdom
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: brian
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:

]]> Any Person Is the Only Self 195790626
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.]]> 240 Elisa Gabbert 0374605890 brian 4 3.76 2024 Any Person Is the Only Self
author: Elisa Gabbert
name: brian
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Metamorphosis and Other Stories]]> 7723 The Metamorphosis,� a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature.

Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. �The Judgment,� which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and �The Stoker,� which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with �The Metamorphosis,� form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,� and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.

Also included are �In the Penal Colony,� a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and �A Hunger Artist,� about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.]]> 224 Franz Kafka 1593080298 brian 4 4.08 1915 The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
author: Franz Kafka
name: brian
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Home 12993086
When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war,he journeys to his native Georgia with a renewed sense of purposein search of his sister, but it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, what it takes to heal, and—above all—what it means to come home.]]> 148 Toni Morrison brian 2 4.04 2012 Home
author: Toni Morrison
name: brian
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves:
review:

]]> How Should a Person Be? 9361377 The Middle Stories and Ticknor comes a bold interrogation into the possibility of a beautiful life. How Should a Person Be? is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the artist as a young woman � of two such artists, in fact.

For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux, a painter, and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which the blow job is the ultimate art form. She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself.

Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be? is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada's most fiercely original writer.]]> 306 Sheila Heti 0887842402 brian 3 3.36 2010 How Should a Person Be?
author: Sheila Heti
name: brian
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves:
review:

]]> The Underground Railroad 30555488
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.]]> 320 Colson Whitehead 0385542364 brian 4 4.04 2016 The Underground Railroad
author: Colson Whitehead
name: brian
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool]]> 174156154
The myth of the 60s depends on the 1950s being the before times of conformity, segregation, straightness—The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man. This all carries some truth, but it does nothing to explain how, in 1959, the great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity, led there by a number of Black geniuses so iconic they go by one name—Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane, and above all, Miles. 1959 saw Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the other members of Miles’s sextet come together to record what is widely considered the greatest jazz album of all time, and certainly the Kind of Blue .


3 Shades of Blue is James Kaplan’s magnificent account of the paths of the three giants Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their path on from there. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the towns that gave jazz its home, from New York and LA to Philadelphia, Chicago and Kansas City. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering. It’s a book about the great forebears of this golden age, particularly Charlie Parker, and the people, like Ornette Coleman, who would take the music down strange new paths. And it’s about why this period has never been replicated, why the world of jazz most people visit is a museum to it.


But above all this is a book about three very different men—their struggles, their choices, their tragedies, their greatness. Bill Evans had a gruesome downward spiral, John Coltrane took the mystic’s path into a space far away from mainstream concerns. Miles had three or four sea changes in him before the end. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands, an American Odyssey, with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.]]> 496 James Kaplan 0525561005 brian 4 4.33 2024 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
author: James Kaplan
name: brian
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Sing, Unburied, Sing 32920226 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781501126062

In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.]]> 285 Jesmyn Ward brian 3 4.00 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: brian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Hard Rain Falling 6553843 308 Don Carpenter 1590173244 brian 5 first day of class he gave us a list of qualities we'd potentially possess as adults & asked us to rank them 1 - 20 in order of importance.
some of the stuff on the list:

rich
healthy
happy
married
employed
famous
intelligent
powerful

cole watched as we scored the rankings and held them up to be collected. he didn't want them. rather, he stood up front and asked how many people put 'happy' as number one. a bunch of us raised our hands. he looked out at the class and said 'anyone who didn't raise their hand is an idiot'. and that was that. he handed out the syllabus and went into all the class requirement bullshit. most of the kids thought he was a typical teacher asshole but all that 'happy' and 'idiot' palaver stuck with some of us.

i love love love lerve luff looooooove hard rain falling. let's make it the next goodreads cause célèbre, yeah? let's resist the temptation to be mannered and reasonable and not shout our heads off so as not to feel like an asshole later, ok? let's just belt it all out and have a few extra slugs and get all giddy and excited and dance around a little and get behind this one. it's a ten-ton truck of existential dread. and we love it.

donald wrote a review i can't top, won't even try, lays out all that is great about this book:



carpenter should've been a bestseller and acknowledged great-writer-of-our-time. instead he fell between the cracks and his book came back into print sixteen years after he blew his brains out.]]> 4.13 1966 Hard Rain Falling
author: Don Carpenter
name: brian
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves:
review:
eighth grade i had an economics teacher called dr. cole.
first day of class he gave us a list of qualities we'd potentially possess as adults & asked us to rank them 1 - 20 in order of importance.
some of the stuff on the list:

rich
healthy
happy
married
employed
famous
intelligent
powerful

cole watched as we scored the rankings and held them up to be collected. he didn't want them. rather, he stood up front and asked how many people put 'happy' as number one. a bunch of us raised our hands. he looked out at the class and said 'anyone who didn't raise their hand is an idiot'. and that was that. he handed out the syllabus and went into all the class requirement bullshit. most of the kids thought he was a typical teacher asshole but all that 'happy' and 'idiot' palaver stuck with some of us.

i love love love lerve luff looooooove hard rain falling. let's make it the next goodreads cause célèbre, yeah? let's resist the temptation to be mannered and reasonable and not shout our heads off so as not to feel like an asshole later, ok? let's just belt it all out and have a few extra slugs and get all giddy and excited and dance around a little and get behind this one. it's a ten-ton truck of existential dread. and we love it.

donald wrote a review i can't top, won't even try, lays out all that is great about this book:



carpenter should've been a bestseller and acknowledged great-writer-of-our-time. instead he fell between the cracks and his book came back into print sixteen years after he blew his brains out.
]]> The Nickel Boys 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead brian 3 4.25 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: brian
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Brian 61966682 184 Jeremy Cooper 1804270369 brian 5 3.83 2023 Brian
author: Jeremy Cooper
name: brian
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:

]]> White on White 54321728
A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes. She rents an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.

In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas.

What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.

White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.]]> 192 Aysegül Savas brian 3 3.66 2021 White on White
author: Aysegül Savas
name: brian
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Terminal Boredom: Stories 55251789
Women and Women: The fissures in a queer matriarchal utopia are exposed when a boy, a creature usually contained in ghettoised isolation - appears beneath young Yūko's window
You May Dream: An extreme government initiative curbing overpopulation prompts a woman to re-evaluate her friendships
Night Picnic: The last family in a desolate city learns to be human through the awkward appropriation of popular culture
That Old Seaside Club: Passive-aggressive furniture provides unwelcome romantic advice
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Tense interplanetary politics distort Emma's love life
Forgotten: Jane's ex-girlfriend reppears, radically altered and insistent on a catch-up
Terminal Boredom: Tokyo's teenagers, disaffected and numb from excessive screentime, find distraction in violence.

Suzuki's singular slant on science fiction remains fresh and essential. Concerns about society, gender and imperialism dovetail irresistibly with flights of speculative wonder. And with a kitchen sink in the corner of even her wildest stories, Suzuki reminds us that while society may be limitless, relationships remain impossible]]> 218 Izumi Suzuki 1788739884 brian 3 3.58 2021 Terminal Boredom: Stories
author: Izumi Suzuki
name: brian
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/07/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Pure Colour 57693639 Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374603944 brian 4 3.45 2022 Pure Colour
author: Sheila Heti
name: brian
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Ms Ice Sandwich 52147406
But life keeps getting in the way � there’s his beloved grandmother’s illness, and a faltering friendship with his classmate Tutti, who she invites him into her private world. Wry, intimate and wonderfully skewed, Ms Ice Sandwich is a poignant depiction of the naivety and wisdom of youth, just as it is passing.]]> 96 Mieko Kawakami 1782276726 brian 4 3.81 2013 Ms Ice Sandwich
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: brian
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:

]]> At the Bottom of the River 69722
Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean--family, manners, and landscape--as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision.

Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things--a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings--shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place--these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected.]]> 82 Jamaica Kincaid 0374527342 brian 3 3.81 1983 At the Bottom of the River
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: brian
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Eating Animals 6604712 Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his life oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. Once he started a family, the moral dimensions of food became increasingly important.


Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill.


Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer "at the table with our greatest philosophers."
]]> 341 Jonathan Safran Foer 0316069906 brian 4 TO SERVE MAN

i can't review this book. can't even finish it. the page-count to tears-shed ratio is just too high. and my head's not in the right place for this shit. (and talk about preaching to the choir�) -- i haven't read jonathan safran foer's novels and fuckoff what he's ever written or what he ever will write: he's a great man for this book alone. he's a great man by default, perhaps, because most people are such evil and miserable cunts. but, no. set apart from a race of miserable cunts he's still a great man.

the problem, really, with hitler and stalin and mao and all those other guys is not what they did... but what they didn't do. a bad case of extreme short-sightedness. they set their crosshairs on specific targets when what they really should have gone after was the destruction of the entire human race. (logistically i know this is problematic; you need to start small. but i can dream, eh?) if i found a magic lantern, before the genie uttered 'and your first wish can't be for a million more wishes', i'd already have made my only wish: that every human being on the planet be instantly transformed into a dog except for me (and rosario dawson. or marisa tomei. decades of silence and masturbation and i'd probably end up throwing myself off a bridge after a week-long romp with a border collie). and i'd hang out with all of 'em. i'd toss a few hundred dogs into a swimming pool and do laps. i'd play tag in forests with 'em. i'd take 'em swimming in oceans and lakes. and then i'd retire to my cabin, start a fire, pour myself and rosario a cold beer, stuff about 3 or 4 hundred dogs into a large room, and me and my woman'd take a long nap with/on them.

the human race is capable of such beauty and goodness, and life is not easy -- there's little clarity: it's seldom easy to know what is truly right or wrong. but factory farms? the torture and intense suffering of creatures weaker than us? no brainer. and all the war and peaces, all the mona lisas, all the moonlight sonatas, all the oskar schindlers and MLKs cannot possibly justify what we've done to one another, what we've done to the planet we inhabit, and most offensively, to the rape and utter destruction of the animal kingdom.

my dream scenario: as a result of the evil actions perpetrated on animals, a variant of swine or bird flu gets ultra-deadly, goes airborne, and wipes us all out. yes. we have reached the point in which the should come and 'serve' us. we've earned it. and we should know what it's like to be on the other end.

as human beings we simply must lie to ourselves about much -- but not about this. it is not necessary. but we do. and for what? for the least interesting of our five senses? because stuff tastes good? we tolerate factory farms because stuff is 'yummy'?
evil and miserable cunts.

do i sound too angry? hyperbolic? unstable? juvenile? like some blood-throwing PETA nut? am i 'not going to convince anyone with this tone'? good. i don't want to convince anyone. i just want the human-eradicating disease to come.
and come soon.

and if considering a vote for this review, understand that it's almost totally certain that if i knew you i'd wanna toss you in a woodchipper.
keep your vote, miserable cunt.]]> 4.20 2009 Eating Animals
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: brian
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/19
shelves:
review:
TO SERVE MAN

i can't review this book. can't even finish it. the page-count to tears-shed ratio is just too high. and my head's not in the right place for this shit. (and talk about preaching to the choir�) -- i haven't read jonathan safran foer's novels and fuckoff what he's ever written or what he ever will write: he's a great man for this book alone. he's a great man by default, perhaps, because most people are such evil and miserable cunts. but, no. set apart from a race of miserable cunts he's still a great man.

the problem, really, with hitler and stalin and mao and all those other guys is not what they did... but what they didn't do. a bad case of extreme short-sightedness. they set their crosshairs on specific targets when what they really should have gone after was the destruction of the entire human race. (logistically i know this is problematic; you need to start small. but i can dream, eh?) if i found a magic lantern, before the genie uttered 'and your first wish can't be for a million more wishes', i'd already have made my only wish: that every human being on the planet be instantly transformed into a dog except for me (and rosario dawson. or marisa tomei. decades of silence and masturbation and i'd probably end up throwing myself off a bridge after a week-long romp with a border collie). and i'd hang out with all of 'em. i'd toss a few hundred dogs into a swimming pool and do laps. i'd play tag in forests with 'em. i'd take 'em swimming in oceans and lakes. and then i'd retire to my cabin, start a fire, pour myself and rosario a cold beer, stuff about 3 or 4 hundred dogs into a large room, and me and my woman'd take a long nap with/on them.

the human race is capable of such beauty and goodness, and life is not easy -- there's little clarity: it's seldom easy to know what is truly right or wrong. but factory farms? the torture and intense suffering of creatures weaker than us? no brainer. and all the war and peaces, all the mona lisas, all the moonlight sonatas, all the oskar schindlers and MLKs cannot possibly justify what we've done to one another, what we've done to the planet we inhabit, and most offensively, to the rape and utter destruction of the animal kingdom.

my dream scenario: as a result of the evil actions perpetrated on animals, a variant of swine or bird flu gets ultra-deadly, goes airborne, and wipes us all out. yes. we have reached the point in which the should come and 'serve' us. we've earned it. and we should know what it's like to be on the other end.

as human beings we simply must lie to ourselves about much -- but not about this. it is not necessary. but we do. and for what? for the least interesting of our five senses? because stuff tastes good? we tolerate factory farms because stuff is 'yummy'?
evil and miserable cunts.

do i sound too angry? hyperbolic? unstable? juvenile? like some blood-throwing PETA nut? am i 'not going to convince anyone with this tone'? good. i don't want to convince anyone. i just want the human-eradicating disease to come.
and come soon.

and if considering a vote for this review, understand that it's almost totally certain that if i knew you i'd wanna toss you in a woodchipper.
keep your vote, miserable cunt.
]]> <![CDATA[In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife]]> 199798896 A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death—and what might follow—by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.

For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet, the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,� his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.� That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.

This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.]]> 176 Sebastian Junger 1668050838 brian 4 3.76 2024 In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
author: Sebastian Junger
name: brian
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds]]> 9704
For centuries few terrors were more vivid in the West than fear of "the Turk," and many people still think of Turkey as repressive, wild, and dangerous. Crescent and Star is Stephen Kinzer's compelling report on the truth about this nation of contradictions - poised between Europe and Asia, caught between the glories of its Ottoman past and its hopes for a democratic future, between the dominance of its army and the needs of its civilian citizens, between its secular expectations and its Muslim traditions.

Kinzer vividly describes Turkey's captivating delights as he smokes a water pipe, searches for the ruins of lost civilizations, watches a camel fight, and discovers its greatest poet. But he is also attuned to the political landscape, taking us from Istanbul's elegant cafes to wild mountain outposts on Turkey's eastern borders, while along the way he talks to dissidents and patriots, villagers and cabinet ministers. He reports on political trials and on his own arrest by Turkish soldiers when he was trying to uncover secrets about the army's campaigns against Kurdish guerillas. He explores the nation's hope to join the European Union, the human-rights abuses that have kept it out, and its difficult relations with Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks.

Will this vibrant country, he asks, succeed in becoming a great democratic state? He makes it clear why Turkey is poised to become "the most audacious nation of the twenty-first century."]]> 272 Stephen Kinzer 0374528667 brian 4 3.84 2001 Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds
author: Stephen Kinzer
name: brian
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/17
shelves:
review:

]]> You Like It Darker 201242757 From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER.

“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,� writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,� and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

“Two Talented Bastids� explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,� a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,� a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,� a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man� asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.]]> 502 Stephen King 1668037718 brian 3 4.16 2024 You Like It Darker
author: Stephen King
name: brian
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves:
review:

]]> The Incendiaries 36679056 A powerful, darkly glittering novel of violence, love, faith, and loss, as a young woman at an elite American university is drawn into acts of domestic terrorism by a cult tied to North Korea.

Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn't tell anyone she blames herself for her mother's recent death. Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe.

Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is increasingly drawn into a religious group—a secretive extremist cult—founded by a charismatic former student, John Leal. He has an enigmatic past that involves North Korea and Phoebe's Korean American family. Meanwhile, Will struggles to confront the fundamentalism he's tried to escape, and the obsession consuming the one he loves. When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe disappears. Will devotes himself to finding her, tilting into obsession himself, seeking answers to what happened to Phoebe and if she could have been responsible for this violent act.

The Incendiaries is a fractured love story and a brilliant examination of the minds of extremist terrorists, and of what can happen to people who lose what they love most.]]> 214 R.O. Kwon 0735213895 brian 3 3.21 2018 The Incendiaries
author: R.O. Kwon
name: brian
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves:
review:

]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 brian 4 3.49 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: brian
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/06/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Istanbul: Memories and the City]]> 11690
Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy–or–hüü�that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.

With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters–both Turkish and foreign–who would shape his consciousness of his city.

Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges� Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.]]> 356 Orhan Pamuk 1400033888 brian 2 3.82 2003 Istanbul: Memories and the City
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: brian
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Their Eyes Were Watching God 37415 238 Zora Neale Hurston 0061120065 brian 4 3.98 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: brian
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/05/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The Bastard of Istanbul 98920
In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard� of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya’s mother; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his wife and her Armenian daughter, Armanoush. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul in search of her identity, she finds the Kazanci sisters and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is uncovered that links the two families and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres. Full of vigorous, unforgettable female characters, The Bastard of Istanbul is a bold, powerful tale that will confirm Shafak as a rising star of international fiction.]]> 368 Elif Shafak 0670038342 brian 2 3.88 2006 The Bastard of Istanbul
author: Elif Shafak
name: brian
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/05/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Madonna in a Fur Coat 34303467 Available in English for the first time, this best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin.

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst the city’s bustling streets, elegant museums, passionate politics, and infamous cabarets, a chance meeting with a beautiful half-Jewish artist transforms him forever. Caught between his desire for freedom from tradition and his yearning to belong, he struggles to hold on to the new life he has found with the woman he loves.

Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric, and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings, the relentless pull of family ties, and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. First published in 1943, this novel, with its quiet yet insistent defiance of social norms, has been topping best-seller lists in Turkey since 2013.]]> 208 Sabahattin Ali 1590518802 brian 3 4.03 1943 Madonna in a Fur Coat
author: Sabahattin Ali
name: brian
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1943
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World]]> 29430009 The first single-volume history of Istanbul in decades: a biography of the city at the center of civilizations past and present.

For more than two millennia Istanbul has stood at the crossroads of the world, perched at the very tip of Europe, gazing across the shores of Asia. The history of this city--known as Byzantium, then Constantinople, now Istanbul--is at once glorious, outsized, and astounding. Founded by the Greeks, its location blessed it as a center for trade but also made it a target of every empire in history, from Alexander the Great and his Macedonian Empire to the Romans and later the Ottomans. At its most spectacular Emperor Constantine I re-founded the city as New Rome, the capital of the eastern Roman empire, and dramatically expanded the city, filling it with artistic treasures, and adorning the streets with opulent palaces. Around it all Constantine built new walls, truly impregnable, that preserved power, wealth, and withstood any aggressor--walls that still stand for tourists to visit.
From its ancient past to the present, we meet the city through its ordinary citizens--the Jews, Muslims, Italians, Greeks, and Russians who used the famous baths and walked the bazaars--and the rulers who built it up and then destroyed it, including Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who christened the city "Istanbul" in 1930. Thomas F. Madden's entertaining narrative brings to life the city we see today, including the rich splendor of the churches and monasteries that spread throughout the city.
Istanbul draws on a lifetime of study and the latest scholarship, transporting readers to a city of unparalleled importance and majesty that holds the key to understanding modern civilization. In the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, "If the Earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capital."]]> 381 Thomas F. Madden 0670016608 brian 3 4.25 2016 Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World
author: Thomas F. Madden
name: brian
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/05/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)]]> 133539
He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.]]> 615 Marcel Proust 0375751548 brian 4 4.28 1913 Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: brian
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1913
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/04/29
shelves:
review:

]]> The Feast of the Goat 53969 ]]> 475 Mario Vargas Llosa 0571207766 brian 5 [image error]

Merged review:

[image error]]]> 4.27 2000 The Feast of the Goat
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: brian
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/28
shelves:
review:
[image error]

Merged review:

[image error]
]]> Grief Is for People 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]> 208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 brian 3 3.84 2024 Grief Is for People
author: Sloane Crosley
name: brian
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Desperate Characters 23316532
First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature.]]> 192 Paula Fox 0393351106 brian 4 3.49 1970 Desperate Characters
author: Paula Fox
name: brian
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Pew 51542370
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of their true nature—as a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.

Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters� true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.]]> 224 Catherine Lacey 0374230927 brian 4 3.71 2020 Pew
author: Catherine Lacey
name: brian
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett 0385550367 brian 4 4.45 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: brian
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> Death Valley 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 brian 3 3.46 2023 Death Valley
author: Melissa Broder
name: brian
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Your Absence Is Darkness 205393419
An incandescent romance about the misfortune of mortality and the strange salve of time, Your Absence is Darkness is a spellbinding story of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.]]> 432 Jón Kalman Stefánsson 1771965819 brian 4 4.18 2020 Your Absence Is Darkness
author: Jón Kalman Stefánsson
name: brian
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness]]> 249042
"Compelling ... Harrowing ... a vivid portrait of a debilitating disorder ... It offers the solace of a shared experience."� The New York Times

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his experience of crippling depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.]]> 84 William Styron 0679736395 brian 3 4.01 1990 Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
author: William Styron
name: brian
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> So Much Blue 31450930
Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care.

What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.

So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.]]> 236 Percival Everett 1555977820 brian 2 4.00 2017 So Much Blue
author: Percival Everett
name: brian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Percival Everett by Virgil Russell]]> 15792900 “Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie.� �Wall Street Journal

A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?

Let’s simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can’t distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy’s troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust?

Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.]]> 227 Percival Everett 1555976344 brian 3 3.70 2013 Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
author: Percival Everett
name: brian
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/03/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne]]> 59851731 From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.

In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father's consent; struggled to feed a family of ten children; and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.]]> 352 Katherine Rundell 0374607400 brian 3 4.14 2022 Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
author: Katherine Rundell
name: brian
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/02/26
shelves:
review:

]]>