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August 17
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Algernon
gave
 
to:
Mort: A Discworld Novel (Mass Market Paperback)
by Terry Pratchett
bookshelves:
fiction
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my rating:
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Algernon said:
"By far, one of the finest of all the DiscWorld novels, with a story that stands on its own feet and requires no previous knowledge of the DiscWorld's history and characters. Funny, sweet, and a pleasure from beginning to end.
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Algernon
gave
to:
The Elements of Style, Third Edition (Hardcover)
by William Strunk Jr.
bookshelves:
writing
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Algernon
gave
to:
The Reivers (Paperback)
by William Faulkner
bookshelves:
fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in August, 2008
Algernon said:
"At my high school, they introduced us to Faulkner with SANCTUARY. I never returned to him until this summer, when somewhere or other I picked up a copy of this, Faulkner's last novel, published a month before he died in 1962. The following year, it...more
At my high school, they introduced us to Faulkner with SANCTUARY. I never returned to him until this summer, when somewhere or other I picked up a copy of this, Faulkner's last novel, published a month before he died in 1962. The following year, it won a Pulitzer, yet it is one of his least-known works.
I am convinced this is the novel with which to introduce readers to Faulkner. It is set in the fictitious Yoknapatawpha County that is the setting of several of his novels, a landscape with a rich geneaology of characters.
For his last novel, Faulker wrote a delightful coming-of-age "reminiscence" set in 1905 - funny, wise, and wistful in tone, with some excellent characters. In particular, note the complexity of the relationships between white and black characters throughout.
The prose is distinctly Faulknerian yet more linear and accessible than some of the bigger works from which Faulkner earns his more intimidating reputation. It may not be considered one of his masterpieces, yet it is funny and touching, excellent quality, and enjoyable to read....less
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August 09
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Algernon
gave
to:
Zen Heart (Paperback)
by Gensho Hozumi
bookshelves:
buddhism,
zen
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in January, 2008
Algernon said:
"A small paperback consisting of VERY short Zen talks by a Rinzai Zen Master. There are some nice turning words and insights here, but never going into much depth or detail. It's worth having somewhere near your desk or wherever you take a break dur...more
A small paperback consisting of VERY short Zen talks by a Rinzai Zen Master. There are some nice turning words and insights here, but never going into much depth or detail. It's worth having somewhere near your desk or wherever you take a break during the day....less
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Algernon
gave
to:
History As a System (Paperback)
by José Ortega y Gasset
bookshelves:
essays
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008
Algernon said:
"No other reviews of this so far, probably because a discussion of these remarkable essays, or even an overview of Ortega y Gasset's work, is beyond the scope of this little text box.
The identity of humankind, argues Ortega, is the history of mank...more
No other reviews of this so far, probably because a discussion of these remarkable essays, or even an overview of Ortega y Gasset's work, is beyond the scope of this little text box.
The identity of humankind, argues Ortega, is the history of mankind. The simplicity of his view is deceptive and sophisticated, written in a conversational style with much wit.
There is much I could say in refutation of his peculiar projections about "bodhisattva culture" but, again, a review here is not the place. ...less
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August 07
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Algernon
gave
to:
Acres and Pains (Paperback)
by S.J. Perelman
bookshelves:
humor
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Algernon said:
"If you come across a copy of this gem, don't pass it by. S.J. Perelman was an incomparable master of literary humor, often imitated but never equalled. These preposterous tales, inspired by his purchase of a farm in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, are not o...more
If you come across a copy of this gem, don't pass it by. S.J. Perelman was an incomparable master of literary humor, often imitated but never equalled. These preposterous tales, inspired by his purchase of a farm in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, are not only rollickingly funny, but written in meticulous prose that will send you scrambling for a dictionary that will, all too likely, be inadequate for the job. Perelman's vocabulary is a mind-altering drug. ...less
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Algernon
read and liked
Isiscaughey's
review of Life with Jeeves:
"Life with Jeeves was the first Jeeves and Wooster book I read as an adult, and I was totally blown away by how good a writer P.G. Wodehouse is. It takes a lot of talent to write anything this funny, and yet not sacrifice the characters to the one-di...more
Life with Jeeves was the first Jeeves and Wooster book I read as an adult, and I was totally blown away by how good a writer P.G. Wodehouse is. It takes a lot of talent to write anything this funny, and yet not sacrifice the characters to the one-dimensional nature parody so often demands.
Bertie is a wonderful narrator, with his lovely grasp of language, and total lack of common sense. Jeeves is of course one of the greatest characters of the 20th century, and all the other characters that people the Jeeves and Wooster novels are marvels.
Life with Jeeves is a collection of three of the J & W books, the first two of which are earlier novels, the last of which is a later novel. Definitely a great collection, especially for the Bingo fan....less
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August 03
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Algernon
read and liked
ruzmarì's
review of Fight Club:
"Mary Ann Evans, in the 1850s, spoke out against the notion that "lady novelists" were capable of producing only "silly novels" - precious, sentimental, illogical and improbable claptrap - while men produced high literature. She c...more
Mary Ann Evans, in the 1850s, spoke out against the notion that "lady novelists" were capable of producing only "silly novels" - precious, sentimental, illogical and improbable claptrap - while men produced high literature. She changed her name to George Eliot and wrote as a "gender neutral" narrator, highly educated and worldly, and mostly transparent (i.e., not silly).
The 1990s finds us again at a crossroads where literature is concerned, with the rise of Oprah's book club and the whole genre of "chick lit" on the one hand (in many cases just "silly novels by lady novelists" revivified), and a sort of phallic-anxiety heavy-on-the-masculine literature on the other. This second group, I like to call "guy crap." It's not a bad label ; there's some good stuff in guy crap, just like there is on Oprah's book list. Guy crap includes genre fiction (Dennis Lehane, Jonathan Lethem), as well as insistent intellectualism (David Foster Wallace, Martin Amis, Paul Auster) ... and, of course, the violent, psych-you-out, latter-day-Robbe-Grillet disturbances of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Some of these are done well, and some of them are just as silly as the lady novelists' claptrap.
Fight Club is one of those novels where the unrelenting GUY-ness of narrator and storyline begins as an intriguing challenge and ends up fatiguing and gimmicky. In case there's anyone out here who hasn't either read the book or seen the movie, I won't spoil anything, I promise. It's a book about a bunch of young men, frustrated in their low-on-the-ladder white-collar day jobs and the emptiness of modern society, who meet routinely to pound each other close to death and plot destruction on a less personal scale. The novel is Palahniuk's testament to the counter-culture of yuppiedom, a world in which squalor and presentability, upward mobility and civil disobedience, live side by side and take each other's measure daily. Palahniuk asks pointed questions about the world we live in, and his prose is the strength of this novel - he keeps you interested, even when you realize how much you hate what he's saying.
And you should hate what Palahniuk is saying. Because at the heart of the novel sits a troubled foundation. It's not the acts of (juvenile, for the most part) sociopathy, or even the ultimate real pathology the characters fall into. What you should hate as (or after) you read is the book's central three-part idea, that (a) the disaffected youth of the video-game generation really do hold the truth about society ; (b) society in turn is nothing but a reflection of the video-game generation's disaffected world-view ; and (c) once a disaffected youth of the video-game generation, always a disaffected youth of the video-game generation - there is no improvement, there is no connection, there is no healing, there is no "out," because boys never grow up. Even the support-group conceit that could represent the narrator's redemptive attempt at relation turns out to be just a device, as egotistical for the character as it is ultimately for the storyline. Relation between people doesn't exist, not really : you don't talk about fight club. We're all just wandering bruised through the wasted LCD landscape, staking out our independence like rebel teenagers, promising to blow up whatever we disagree with.
Palahniuk has said he wrote this book as a kind of provocation, to get back at a publisher for turning down his earlier manuscript. I wonder if he peed in the publisher's soup, too : it wouldn't altogether surprise me....less
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July 31
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Algernon
gave
to:
Floating Off the Page: The Best Stories from The Wall Street Journal's "Middle Column" (Wall Street Journal Book)
by Ken Wells, Michael M. Lewis
bookshelves:
essays
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in January, 2003
Algernon said:
"For 67 years, one of the distinguishing features of the <i>Wall Street Journal</a> has been the "A-hed," a special column where journalists treated unusual stories with excellent writing and humor. Among those who worry about R...more
For 67 years, one of the distinguishing features of the <i>Wall Street Journal</a> has been the "A-hed," a special column where journalists treated unusual stories with excellent writing and humor. Among those who worry about Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper, the a-hed or "middle column" is one of the most frequent concerns.
Surely this argues for a long series of collections like this one. The odd, the offbeat, the beautiful, they are all here, subtly expanding and lightening one's view of the world. ...less
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July 29
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Algernon
gave
to:
Less Than Zero (Paperback)
by Bret Easton Ellis
bookshelves:
fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008
Algernon said:
"Let me state this flatly: I think this novel's literary reputation is overblown. It is not "Catcher In The Rye for the MTV generation" (USA Today). It is a young writer's passionate hate letter to Los Angeles, a meandering f...more
Let me state this flatly: I think this novel's literary reputation is overblown. It is not "Catcher In The Rye for the MTV generation" (USA Today). It is a young writer's passionate hate letter to Los Angeles, a meandering fantasy that repeats a single point for 200 pages with some intentionally annoying prose. It almost reads like one run-on sentence, an aqueduct of statements connected by an infinite series of 'ands.'
Moreover, the events in the novel become overwrought and preposterous. Clay, the first-person narrator, is home from college for the summer. Home is the Los Angeles of the wealthy, privileged, and deeply bored youth of the 1980's, awash in sex without intimacy, heaps of cocaine, families lacking affection, and words that don't communicate.
Ellis makes some skillful use of advertising slogans and wildlife in the canyons around Mulholland to create a darkening sense of foreboding. Clay sticks around out of a compulsion to see "the worst of the worst," and a similar, bemused compulsion kept me reading to the end. How dark and preposterous will the scenes become, simply to reiterate the point that the generation of whom he is writing lack a moral compass or social conscience? Raped children and dead bodies are piled at the readers feet, and conversations that scream self-parody buzz in the ears, even as we recall that Michiko Kakutani praised this novel's "documentary reality." Ha.
At the end, Clay is asked by a woman who wants to love him what he cares about and he can't name a thing. By this time, it isn't news, and there's not much for us to care about, either. ...less
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