http://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/112056 en-US Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:50:30 -0800 60 http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 10551663 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:50:30 -0800
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: thingsilove
review:
They got better and better right up until the end. Rowling's books are the kind you can go back to over and over and over, written not just to become part of a child's bookshelf, but part of a child's life.
]]> 10551517 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:46:58 -0800
author: João Cabral de Melo Neto
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry
review:
You know, it's a real pity we don't read more poetry in translation. There's a lot of twaddle out there about how you never get the 'real' experience of the poetry, but I think sometimes poetry isn't the real experience of poetry, anyway, so why let that stop you? This stuff is totally captivating, for instance.
]]> 10551296 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:44:35 -0800
author: Hanif Kureishi
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: awfullyfunbooks
review:
I love Hanif Kureishi. I think he's one of the best storytellers out there at the moment, and one of the only authors I can think of who can deal with serious subject matter (identity politics, racism, homosexuality) without ever taking himself or any of his characters too seriously; he holds the heartbreaking truths behind the stories and slightly cheeky view of life in general in close to perfect balance.
]]> 10551104 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:41:19 -0800
author: Phaidon Press
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: foodandwine
review:
This is the book that all Italian brides get as a wedding present - it is the best and most complete guide to authentic Italian home cooking, and now it is available in English! The recipes are easy and the food comes out perfect every time. If you have this book and Marcella's "Essentials," you have nearly everything you need to know about Italian cooking, short of a few years in Italy (and the insanely wonderful home-grown ingredients).
]]> 10550860 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:38:10 -0800
author: Irma S. Rombauer
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: foodandwine
review:
This is the book to which I turn when I want to know how long to roast a stuffed chicken, whether or not the pork roast can be pink, how to make a loaf of holiday gingerbread, what to do to make a decent merangue, all the basic cookery techniques and ingredients (for American cuisine, anyway), and the recipes are simple enough and well enough explained to make innovating and revising a simple and risk-free process. For everybody from the total beginner to the fairly accomplished risk-taker, this is pretty good. It's not Larousse Gastronomique or anything, But it's pretty damn useful.
]]> 10550637 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:33:58 -0800
author: Ted Berrigan
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry
review:
Yay. Derek and I listened to these, amongst other poems, in his car on our way to Vegas last year. To this day, I cannot think of that trip without thinking of the line we both seemed to feel more or less summed up that little trip and each of our lives in general at that particular cosmic juncture: "I took a pill. I feel ill/ but optimistic."
]]> 10549696 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:17:59 -0800
author: Bill Kennedy
name: Rebecca
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry
review:
This is a crazy wonderful little book, each line beginning "you are" is its own imperative but as a study in accumulation, the collective is in fact an apostrophe to the you that is (or was originally) one specific person that could also be and also is anyone and everyone. The text is, funnily enough, generated using internet search functions. Usually I would wrinkle my nose and say it sounds gimmicky, but considering the nature of the "you" and the apostrophe, it's actually kind of satisfyingly apt.
]]> 10549488 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:12:32 -0800
author: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry, thingsilove
review:
The kind of poet who doesn't just observe but actively attends to things, like the amazing notion that despite its resemblance to glass, there must be blood even in the wing of a dragonfly - that is my kind of poet. I LOVE these poems.
]]> 10549191 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:07:32 -0800
author: James Richardson
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry
review:
These aphorisms are really marvelous, in the tradition not only of proverbs, like Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," but also of fragment. I love the idea of the fragment as a unit of poetry - Jim's book is also fantastic for teaching the idea of a poem as the form of a thought, which has been invaluable introducing students new to poetry to the essentially formless-form of free verse. One of my favorites from the book, "All stones are broken stones."
]]> 10547811 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:57:17 -0800
author: Adrian Blevins
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry
review:
Adrian is possibly the most interesting person I have ever met. She was one of the fellows in my workshop at Sewanee this past summer, and one of the few people with whom I was able to grumble about the lack of aesthetic range at that conference, without feeling like I had to explain that didn't mean I wasn't having a marvelous time. Not only that, but she is one of the best readers of poetry I have ever known - astute, articulate, always with an eye to all the possibilities a poem seems to hold. She's read everything, memorized most of it, and I think all these things show in the poems, which have the long conversational lines of a beat poem, but the language has both more levity and more gravity than the term "conversational" suggests. And the poems themselves are a record of a life and a series of emotional responses to it that are as complex and immediate and unapologetic as the poems themselves.
]]> 10547730 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:39:16 -0800
author: Matthew Zapruder
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry
review:
Really, really lovely. For more on Matthew, see the stuff I babbled about in my "review" of The Pajamist.
]]> 10547371 Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:38:21 -0800
author: Matthew Zapruder
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 12/17/07
shelves: poetry
review:
Matthew is not only a marvelous person (good-natured, personable, occasionally goofy, fiercely smart), he is also a really giving and really lyric poet - lyric not in the generic sense that often stands in for something close to "pretty," but lyric in the truest sense of musical. Matthew is a musician - I suppose that helps - but you can hear it in the language, which at times has the drawn-out quality of sung verses, at times seems to dance, and feels simultaneously surprising and inevitable, like the infinite variation of a refrain the poems always suggest but never actually repeat. Its subject, too, tends to be something I'm a real softy for - place, and the way people move through it. And, naturally, the way it moves through them. In other words, because this is really not supposed to sound like a blurb for the book cover, it's really good.
]]> 1826233 Sun, 10 Jun 2007 13:39:57 -0700
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 06/10/07
shelves: awfullyfunbooks
review:

]]> 1652826 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:30:27 -0700
author: Anne Carson
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: poetry
review:
Anne Carson is one of my favorite poets, and the "Short Talks" in this book are some of her smartest poems. Craig and I had an interesting conversation the other day about the way a kind of "ecriture feminine" is employed in contemporary poetry to enable poets to be intimate without being or risking being confessional. Anne Carson is someone who, I think, does a bit of that. The result is poems that may not make logical sense, but they make perfect poetical sense. Little is given up, much is drawn out - good stuff.
]]> 1652345 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:09:59 -0700
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: thingsilove
review:
Obviously I have a thing for books told from the untrustworthy perspective of sordid and even criminal characters, which doesn't really speak well for the state of my own imagination, but this (like "The Stranger") is another favorite by another favorite author. Again, a classic that should be read not because it is a classic, but because if you do not enjoy it, I cannot account for you.
]]> 1652104 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:05:25 -0700
author: M.F.K. Fisher
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: foodandwine
review:
Auden called M.F.K. Fisher "the best prose writer in America" at one time, and it's easy to see why. Where food writing can be incomprehensibly prim, or predictably pretentious, or else just vile, M.F.K. Fisher understood better than anyone else that food is really where everything about a person, a people, a culture or a tradition is realized. She tells marvelous stories, often wildly historically inaccurate but wonderful nonetheless. Whether you're curious about how haute cuisine came to be (see the story about Cleopatra's famous dinner, where she served, among other delicacies, pearls), Roman garum (ew), or poor Catherine's lonely Florentine cooks in exile in France, or even just the pleasures of secretly eating wedges of tangerine warmed on a radiator, this is the genuine article - food writing that is as much about the writing as it is about the food.
]]> 1610344 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:58:09 -0700
author: Albert Camus
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 03/07
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: thingsilove
review:
Albert Camus, the French Algerian author of this book, as well as two of my favorite collections of humanist essays, "Resistance, Rebellion, and Death," and "The Myth of Sisyphus," was one of the great novelists of the 20th century. This book, relatively short and quick reading for as much as it tells and does, is a complex psychological portrait of a killer. But Marceaux is not a weird, twisted, evil killer, but a killer whose major failing is his inability to recognize the humanity, or even the expectations, of others, to say nothing of himself. He is despised by other characters for his failure to be polite, or for being a bore. Eventually, he kills someone for no exciting reason at all, perhaps the most terrifying kind of murder to imagine, and in turn asks the reader to question his/her own response to the problem. The relationship between the narrator, the main character, and the reader is characterized by both intimacy and detachment, a unique literary acheivement without which this would be just another Modernist text about alienation. But in Camus' expert hands, this becomes a haunting, eerie story about someone who is a stranger in every possible context, how we feel about such people, how we might even be such people, and might never know it.
]]> 1610507 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:57:48 -0700
author: David Mitchell
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 06/07
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: awfullyfunbooks
review:
David Mitchell is kind of a master storyteller. This is part adventure novel, part mystery, part historical fiction, part postmodern experiment. Imminently readable, totally entertaining, I'm only part way through but so far it's hard to put down. A great summer read, I think.
]]> 1610548 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:57:29 -0700
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 08/06
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: awfullyfunbooks
review:
This is Harry Potter for big people. Even though Harry Potter is also for big people. This is a book about the history of magic in Britain, taking place roughly around the time of the Napoleanic Wars. It's a little sinister, has some great sort of legends woven in, is beautifully written and imagined, and I read all thousand or so pages of it in about three days, and picked it up from the beginning and re-read the whole thing again as soon as I was done. As my dear friend Em Wilson said, "I wish I'd never read it, so I could read it all over again for the first time." It's fabulous.
]]> 1610727 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:56:56 -0700
author: Stephen Greenblatt
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 12/06
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: awfullyfunbooks
review:
Anybody who liked Tom Stoppard's screenplay for "Shakespeare in Love," anyone with a passing academic interest in the mostly-undocumented but heavily-researched life of William Shakespeare will enjoy this book. Harvard New-Historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt paints a portrait of the social, cultural, and political context in which Shakespeare would have been writing, and then follows a series of fascinating leads in order to place the famous playwright in various times, places, sometimes even scandals that took place then and there. I actually listened to this on tape on a long bus trip, which was a great way to listen to it. It really does evoke the atmospheric age of the English Renaissance, I was totally absorbed while, at the same time, learning all sorts of things that were new to me.
]]> 1610978 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:56:23 -0700
author: E.M. Forster
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1924
rating: 5
read at: 01/05
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: thingsilove
review:
I love E.M. Forester. "Room With a View" is another wonderful book, but this one is probably my favorite. Not only are all of the fascinating characters written to perfection, but the narration is a kind of character in itself. Fielding is, I think, my favorite character, but if it weren't enough to have love, family drama, sex scandal, political and military drama, it's all set against the backdrop of India during Colonialism, with all its beauties and brutalities. One of my favorite scenes of fiction takes place in the infamous Marabar Caves, whose terrifying echoes give back any word, phrase, or language as "Ba-ra-room!"
]]> 1611054 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:55:55 -0700
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 01/07
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: poetry
review:
Since I discovered it, this has been and remains one of my favorite books of poems, alongside Lawrence's other non-rhyming poetry book, "Look, We Have Come Through." There is a kind of incantatory quality to Lawrence, which he mysteriously acheives despite having some of the most seemingly free-flowing and organic lines in the English language. The poems do, as the title suggest, take the natural world as their subject, but this is not a book of nature poems. Rather, it reveals that everything, including the most evangelical, urbane, industrial elements of our lives, are encompassed by that concept, "The Natural World," to say nothing of our own humanity - our desires, anxieties, revelations. Though I am not a great fan of Lawrence's fiction, I can only describe his poems as having a kind of "lyric ferocity" about them. This is truly exceptional stuff.
]]> 1612990 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:55:36 -0700
author: Marcella Hazan
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.67
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: foodandwine
review:
This is the cookbook I probably use most often. Marcella's recipes, for as intimidating as they may sound (risotti, stuffed squid, spinach and ricotta gnocchi, carciofi alla romana, etc.) are all authentic, easy to follow, and turn out properly every single time. Furthermore, there's lots of great information about ingredients (and how to select the best and freshest), history and culture as relates to ingredients and dishes, and overall good, sound cooking common-sense. She is occasionally more of a purist than I am, but isn't that the kind of teacher you'd like to rebel against from time to time? I've made this chicken marsala recipe a thousand times, so that I've got it memorized, and people go bonkers for it every single time.
]]> 1613046 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:55:16 -0700
In the forthcoming second book, which I hope to be able to include here very soon, Craig departs somewhat from both the formal constraints and the elements of dramaturgy present in this book - Made Flesh is a series of poems about, well, about many things, but first and foremost about the materiality of language and about the things that can only be made material through language. It is a book about talking, and not talking; about listening, and failing to listen, about the way that words bind us, and the potential of language to free us. It is rapturous and tragic and beauteous and sometimes even operatic - all the poems, most of them quite long, have been published. Sections of two of the poems appear in Best American Poetry anthologies (edited by Lyn Hejinian and Billy Collins, respectively). Others can be found in various wonderful journals, including several in Poetry, Yale Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere.]]>
author: Craig Arnold
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: friendsbooks
review:
Well, in my humble (and unbiased, of course) opinion, Craig is one of the great poets of his/our generation, and likely beyond. He is a master craftsman, but more importantly these poems, while restrained by form, are deeply felt, are storytelling in the grand tradition. Craig never shies away from the major subjects of poetry - love, loss, the quest to understand the self in relation to others and to the world, the reason we feel compelled to utter anything, ever. This is not spangled fad poetry, this is the genuine article - virtuoso verse written from a place of genuine longing to be understood.

In the forthcoming second book, which I hope to be able to include here very soon, Craig departs somewhat from both the formal constraints and the elements of dramaturgy present in this book - Made Flesh is a series of poems about, well, about many things, but first and foremost about the materiality of language and about the things that can only be made material through language. It is a book about talking, and not talking; about listening, and failing to listen, about the way that words bind us, and the potential of language to free us. It is rapturous and tragic and beauteous and sometimes even operatic - all the poems, most of them quite long, have been published. Sections of two of the poems appear in Best American Poetry anthologies (edited by Lyn Hejinian and Billy Collins, respectively). Others can be found in various wonderful journals, including several in Poetry, Yale Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere.
]]> 1613190 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:54:58 -0700
author: Jeanette Winterson
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: thingsilove
review:
Jeanette Winterson was adopted into a Pentacostal family in England, who managed to convince her of her destiny to become a missionary. It was as a teenager she realized they wouldn't be able to stop her kissing girls, and as is so often the case, a writer was born. These stories of childhood are chronicled (with humor and poetry) in her memoir, "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit." This book, "The Passion," is my favorite of the author's substatial ouvre. (I think I spelled that wrong, but oh well.) It's sort of a love story - or even several love stories. But it's more, too: An historical fiction set in nineteenth-century Venice, a beautiful exercise in magical realism, and an almost John Donne-like acheivment in appropriating the language of religion and ritual for a story about love and desire. A genuine page-turner, to boot. I've actually made friends with people because they liked this book, and wasn't sorry.
]]> 1613144 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:54:35 -0700
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/04/07
shelves: thingsilove
review:
What people mostly mostly seem to know about Japanese literary giant Yukio Mishima are the rather unpleasant things, culminating in his gruesome ritual suicide. This book seems like something that could hardly have been written by someone with such capacity for horror. It is a gentle book - sad and wonderous - about a love affair between two young people in a small village, one of whom is a pearl diver. The writing is magnificent and the story is told with sympathy and gentleness. Definitely something to explore.
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