http://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/148664 en-US Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:10:27 -0800 60 http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 16464130 Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:10:27 -0800
author: Harold Brodkey
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 02/26/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 15935840 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:16:55 -0800
author: Annie Dillard
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 02/20/08
shelves:
review:
Flaccid.
]]> 15934863 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:03:45 -0800
author: William Styron
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 02/20/08
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review:

]]> 15934843 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:03:27 -0800
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1857
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 02/20/08
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review:

]]> 15934831 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:03:17 -0800
author: John Edgar Wideman
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 02/20/08
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review:

]]> 12009693 Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:36:29 -0800
You’ll recognize this one near the top of every book critic’s list this year. Just as with García Márquez a while back, the heart of Latin American literature today is clutched tightly in the fist of Roberto Bolaño (Chilean, deceased). His style takes root in Cortázar and Borges, but while they always felt like European-Argentinian hyphenates, Bolaño in The Savage Detectives seems homegrown and impossibly vital. The book is a palimpsest of diaries and voices, springboarding from the story of a young Mexican poet to interviews with over 50 different characters who had encountered the ghostly, itinerant ringleaders of the avant-garde “visceral realist” poets Ulises (!) Lima and Arturo Belano (a thinly veiled Bolaño). It’s smart and sad and full of bawd, and somewhere along the way almost everyone has sex or dies. Somehow poetry seems fun again. ]]>
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 01/08/08
shelves:
review:
Short review/blurb I put elsewhere:

You’ll recognize this one near the top of every book critic’s list this year. Just as with García Márquez a while back, the heart of Latin American literature today is clutched tightly in the fist of Roberto Bolaño (Chilean, deceased). His style takes root in Cortázar and Borges, but while they always felt like European-Argentinian hyphenates, Bolaño in The Savage Detectives seems homegrown and impossibly vital. The book is a palimpsest of diaries and voices, springboarding from the story of a young Mexican poet to interviews with over 50 different characters who had encountered the ghostly, itinerant ringleaders of the avant-garde “visceral realist” poets Ulises (!) Lima and Arturo Belano (a thinly veiled Bolaño). It’s smart and sad and full of bawd, and somewhere along the way almost everyone has sex or dies. Somehow poetry seems fun again.
]]> 4321174 Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:41:44 -0800
author: Josef Škvorecký
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 11/07
date added: 11/22/07
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review:
An autobiography of escape in second-hand readings, the transformation of the despotic within the escaped, the ineluctability of the historically modal, the limitless self-obsessions of an English professor. Etc.
]]> 3226288 Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:36:37 -0800
author: Laszlo Krasznahorkai
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 11/07
date added: 11/22/07
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review:
Each section in this book is a sentence, breaths withheld for too long and then released suddenly, in false relief, as something else goes terribly wrong. At first it seems like a sad comedy down the jigsaw lines of crossed cultures, or a fable about the near-autism of being without shared language--and in part it is--but it's every consummation here that fails. What's strange is that this should be so exhilarating.
]]> 4922319 Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:38:48 -0700
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 08/22/07
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review:

]]> 4320855 Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:24:59 -0700
author: Lynne Tillman
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 08/09/07
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review:
I finished reading this book in a very local bar and then gave it to the woman next to me, who was crying. She said thanks.
]]> 2647314 Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:23:23 -0700
author: Richard Ford
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1998
rating: 3
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date added: 08/09/07
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review:
This is the book wherein Peter Pan gets a driver's licence and realizes he still can't see over the top of the dashboard to drive. It's quite competent.
]]> 3671976 Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:09:56 -0700
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1933
rating: 5
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date added: 07/27/07
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review:

]]> 3422557 Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:08:28 -0700
author: W.H. Auden
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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date added: 07/27/07
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review:
And who's to say you can't take vengeance on the Romans for their grammar?
]]> 3422649 Fri, 27 Jul 2007 13:34:52 -0700
author: Elizabeth Bishop
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1979
rating: 5
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date added: 07/27/07
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review:
Elizabeth Bishop reminds me of a woman who buttoned her blouse all the way up to her chin and then sneakily, cheekily, undid the clasp that showed her belly button.
]]> 3422597 Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:52:09 -0700
author: Mark Levine
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/23/07
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review:

]]> 3422213 Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:44:26 -0700
author: Anne Carson
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 07/23/07
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review:

]]> 3132870 Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:59:31 -0700
It's not that it's "safe" (although everyone seems to like it) but that it's one of those transcendent middebrow books like Salinger's--Shawshank Redemption, which everyone also likes, does the same thing in the movie genre--that confirms everything you already thought or wanted to believe, and makes it seem richer than you'd ever thought. For which I'm grateful.]]>
author: Charles Baxter
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/16/07
shelves:
review:
This is a book I often recommend when asked to recommend a book by someone whose taste I don't know well.

It's not that it's "safe" (although everyone seems to like it) but that it's one of those transcendent middebrow books like Salinger's--Shawshank Redemption, which everyone also likes, does the same thing in the movie genre--that confirms everything you already thought or wanted to believe, and makes it seem richer than you'd ever thought. For which I'm grateful.
]]> 2997793 Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:51:52 -0700
Thanks, teach.

But then I read this book--I'd yet read nothing of his--and I developed some sympathy for him.

It turns out just he's just a sloppy thinker and slightly clunky writer and ragingly romantical cynic thrust into far too much prominence, and asked to be much more than he is. We should have all left him alone, even after the fatwa--then he would have been a much more charming asshole, maybe even a likeable raconteur.

But then, if he wasn't what he was I might have had the charity to give him one more star (thereby, of course, making his career and causing the same problem all over again.)]]>
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 07/16/07
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review:
When I met the guy, I thought he was a pedantic blowhard with a swollen head whose reach far extended his grasp. "Ulysses," he said, "is really Leopold Bloom's book, not the book of Stephen Daedalus. Though some may disagree."

Thanks, teach.

But then I read this book--I'd yet read nothing of his--and I developed some sympathy for him.

It turns out just he's just a sloppy thinker and slightly clunky writer and ragingly romantical cynic thrust into far too much prominence, and asked to be much more than he is. We should have all left him alone, even after the fatwa--then he would have been a much more charming asshole, maybe even a likeable raconteur.

But then, if he wasn't what he was I might have had the charity to give him one more star (thereby, of course, making his career and causing the same problem all over again.)
]]> 3132073 Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:39:35 -0700
author: John Ashbery
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.73
book published: 1986
rating: 5
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date added: 07/16/07
shelves:
review:
This: this is an example of leaving out.
]]> 3028238 Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:15:55 -0700
author: Denis Johnson
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1992
rating: 5
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date added: 07/13/07
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review:

]]> 2997798 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:51:31 -0700
author: Italo Calvino
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1990
rating: 3
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date added: 07/12/07
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review:

]]> 2997777 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:50:57 -0700
author: Amy Hempel
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/12/07
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review:

]]> 2997758 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:50:27 -0700
author: Anne Carson
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/12/07
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review:

]]> 2997377 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:40:53 -0700
author: Marcel Proust
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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date added: 07/12/07
shelves:
review:
5,000 pages to the left of the bookmark. Who's gonna front on THAT?
]]> 2986475 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:57:55 -0700
But I read this, often over and over, and fall in love with what she was, even her outsized narcissism and implied cruelties, even her contagion and paranoia, and know that even knowing the reprehensible, shriveled porcelain doll she's become in the meantime, I still would have married her, given the chance, into a life of slow-dawning disappointment.

And wouldn't you? You don't grow Didion in the modern lawntending suburbs. You grow her in the desert. As Hempel wrote once: Nerves like that are only brought off by catastrophe.]]>
author: Joan Didion
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/12/07
shelves:
review:
It would be interesting to track precisely when Didion went from an essayist of surprise and guts and instinct to a useless "journalist", a neurotic upper-upper-middle-class self-chronicler and collector of the obvious--when she lost heart and became her own problems.

But I read this, often over and over, and fall in love with what she was, even her outsized narcissism and implied cruelties, even her contagion and paranoia, and know that even knowing the reprehensible, shriveled porcelain doll she's become in the meantime, I still would have married her, given the chance, into a life of slow-dawning disappointment.

And wouldn't you? You don't grow Didion in the modern lawntending suburbs. You grow her in the desert. As Hempel wrote once: Nerves like that are only brought off by catastrophe.
]]> 2985994 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:33:11 -0700
author: Deborah Eisenberg
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/12/07
shelves:
review:
It's strangely, amazingly touching when the same things happen to the same woman. Just ask Mavis Gallant.
]]> 2985824 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:28:12 -0700
Of course: I was 19 when I read the thing, so maybe this book was just adolescence's departing revenge upon succumbing to pseudo-adulthood.

Still, ten years later, even though I haven't read it since, certain scenes and moments reverberate, call themselves back. I'll forever take note, in each person I meet, whether they check the dirtiness of their nails with their fingers curled or outstretched. ]]>
author: William Gaddis
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/12/07
shelves:
review:
Big, angry, sad, and rich. I felt changed after reading this, which is something I can say of few books. People speak of this book in hushed, religious tones sometimes, and it makes me nervous: wondering: am I like you?

Of course: I was 19 when I read the thing, so maybe this book was just adolescence's departing revenge upon succumbing to pseudo-adulthood.

Still, ten years later, even though I haven't read it since, certain scenes and moments reverberate, call themselves back. I'll forever take note, in each person I meet, whether they check the dirtiness of their nails with their fingers curled or outstretched.
]]> 2964056 Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:36:55 -0700
Learn German and read this version instead.]]>
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/11/07
shelves:
review:
There's a really shitty translation that just came out that put Bernhard's prose into paragraphs. As if the point weren't that thought in all its claustrophobia is relentless. Plus they made him quiche-and- salad like John Hawkes.

Learn German and read this version instead.
]]> 2781693 Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:26:49 -0700
Of course, it's not that literature's a sullen mathematics of division and remainders, some miserly portioning from civilization's distant fount, but whereas Cortazar's shorts (unlike his brilliantly loose-tethered novels) feel like second-degree imitations, Landolfi's feel anarchic and impossible and sometimes strangely Victorian in their comedy.

Nikolai Gogol's wife, in case one's wondering, is a balloon, whose expressions and manner Gogol can change to his liking through ingenious inflation and slackening, and who fattens in the heat and communicates only subtly (and silently) her displeasures at being left alone for so long upstairs...]]>
author: Tommaso Landolfi
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/06/07
shelves:
review:
If Cortazar learned how to write his formal-play-by-numbers short stories from Borges, who learned from Kafka, Landolfi came straight, again, from Kafka into something singular and strange.

Of course, it's not that literature's a sullen mathematics of division and remainders, some miserly portioning from civilization's distant fount, but whereas Cortazar's shorts (unlike his brilliantly loose-tethered novels) feel like second-degree imitations, Landolfi's feel anarchic and impossible and sometimes strangely Victorian in their comedy.

Nikolai Gogol's wife, in case one's wondering, is a balloon, whose expressions and manner Gogol can change to his liking through ingenious inflation and slackening, and who fattens in the heat and communicates only subtly (and silently) her displeasures at being left alone for so long upstairs...
]]> 2780461 Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:44:02 -0700
You might as well give up and die.]]>
author: Norman Rush
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 07/06/07
shelves:
review:
This book is an asphyxiation. At first it seems, dreamily, like a caress, but then the hands get tighter and tighter until you realize the person strangling you is your satyric uncle--old, fat, silver-backed, Id-riddled, self-obsessed, half-brilliant and half-cocked--who smells like Old Spice and ego and used to teach postcolonialism at some backwoods college before being caught hypocritically colonizing half his students.

You might as well give up and die.
]]> 2760519 Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:16:59 -0700
Come to think of it: I don't know why this thing's legal.]]>
author: Norton Juster
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/06/07
shelves:
review:
When I was about six, this book unhinged each word from its neighbor for me. If I'd had my scheduled schizophrenic break during early adulthood, this book would have been the culprit.

Come to think of it: I don't know why this thing's legal.
]]> 2647395 Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:20:24 -0700
If you read quickly, it's like getting a Swedish massage from the inside.]]>
author: John McPhee
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 07/02/07
shelves:
review:
McPhee makes sentences that turn on you at the last second and deliver a sudden, polite fillip to the sinuses--twists like the punch to a joke--likening cars in a mudslide to raisins in uncooked dough, for example, or defining words backwards, or inserting sentimental lyricism into a sentence about sedimentary rock.

If you read quickly, it's like getting a Swedish massage from the inside.
]]> 2647590 Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:08:45 -0700
author: Slavoj Zizek
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/02/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 2633288 Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:07:23 -0700
author: Ivan S. Turgenev
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 07/02/07
shelves:
review:
It seems possible to me that the adolescent Augustin in Le Grand Meaulnes is largely cribbed from Bazarov in this book. They both have a nasty habit of falling madly in reciprocated love with well-heeled girls and then tragically, pridefully lousing it up, and then dying. Go figure.
]]> 2510706 Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:51:00 -0700
He was a mean old son of a bitch, in the words of a friend who knew him--threatening even from his wheelchair--and I wish I hadn't driven tired and newly poor into Saint Louis, ten years too late to meet him.]]>
author: Stanley Elkin
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/28/07
shelves:
review:
Elkin's a master of the huckster's cant, everything always lurching into the transcendent ecstasis of the mundane. I always like visiting this fantasy palace he built out of 2x4s and three-penny nails, where the impure and the average are exalted, where the implausible voice is the only thing to hang onto, where the characters spin wildly out of control in the still-steady hands of an author who always knew what the hell was really going on.

He was a mean old son of a bitch, in the words of a friend who knew him--threatening even from his wheelchair--and I wish I hadn't driven tired and newly poor into Saint Louis, ten years too late to meet him.
]]> 2457875 Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:28:49 -0700
I think she just understood that trouble was never trouble at all--trouble is just everything that actually matters (the blood and money stuff that comes with caring)--and that we could do with a lot more of it.]]>
author: Grace Paley
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/28/07
shelves:
review:
Donald Barthelme once affectionately called her a troublemaker, but I don't know that it's strictly true.

I think she just understood that trouble was never trouble at all--trouble is just everything that actually matters (the blood and money stuff that comes with caring)--and that we could do with a lot more of it.
]]> 2310271 Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:28:52 -0700
author: Joy Williams
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/27/07
shelves:
review:
I frequently have nightmares. They take two inarticulatable forms. There are no images in them at all. They are pure fear and dismay, a sense of the tremendous strength of the dark, a sense that I have not done what it was I knew I should have done.
]]> 2310180 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 16:50:22 -0700
author: Harold Brodkey
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 2299766 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 11:37:23 -0700
Quoth Cheever from his journals: "The only thing I love in this life is my son and my wife's body."]]>
author: John Cheever
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:
I will never ride, a beast's burden, over the mountains, and I will never ruin myself over drapes. I will never know a prostitute in the home of a friend. I will never hate a fireman.

Quoth Cheever from his journals: "The only thing I love in this life is my son and my wife's body."
]]> 2301397 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 11:23:43 -0700
I was an athlete, you see.]]>
author: Donald Barthelme
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:
The only book to every accurately describe the feeling, if not quite the verifiable biographical detail, of my fifth-grade year.

I was an athlete, you see.
]]> 2300983 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 11:10:00 -0700
author: Italo Calvino
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:
I learned how to call for help in a crowded street. I learned how to throw pebbles.
]]> 2300274 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 10:50:32 -0700
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Matthew
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:
Go fish. I've had the same card since Wednesday.
]]> 2300034 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 10:48:31 -0700
I'm stricken. Listen. It's only morning, and I feel the same as you.

Nothing can ruin this.]]>
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:
Did you know how many heroisms there are behind the mulberries each day? Between your pant and the sock?

I'm stricken. Listen. It's only morning, and I feel the same as you.

Nothing can ruin this.
]]> 2299174 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 10:44:22 -0700
author: Bohumil Hrabal
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:
Because peaceful and humble, I have no other way. I am full of regret and of storied resentment, and I catalog each dispute with the humble blade of a woodsman's ax.
]]> 2299934 Sat, 23 Jun 2007 10:34:53 -0700
author: Leonard Michaels
name: Matthew
average rating: 4.58
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 06/23/07
shelves:
review:
Go to hell. Every day I open my door and there you are, looking guilty and itchy and squirmy. How am I supposed to be an effective egotist if YOU'RE the audience? I feel too implicated. Bother someone ugly instead.
]]>