Eric read and liked Nikki's review of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:

"Bird By Bird is less a book about writing techniques and more a writer speaking to other writers and telling them that it's okay. All of it. All their neuroses and hang ups and setbacks. It's okay. Just take it word by word (bird by bird). I don't th...more Bird By Bird is less a book about writing techniques and more a writer speaking to other writers and telling them that it's okay. All of it. All their neuroses and hang ups and setbacks. It's okay. Just take it word by word (bird by bird). I don't think I learned much from it, but just having someone say it's okay to me for two hundred and thirty-seven pages was good. There is some good advice in there about how to start writing a scene you don't know about, how to let your characters develop, how to deal with criticism, how to pull ideas out of the melting pot that is memory. There's a piece of advice that I just love and might have to try some day: write a book for your favourite author. I don't know what I'll write for Susan Cooper or Ursula Le Guin or Guy Gavriel Kay, but I know I want to try writing for them.

Anne Lamott writes understandingly, in a way that will make you smile wryly and -- in places -- probably make you want to cry. It may not teach you anything beyond it's okay, and you might find that even that you know, but her writing is lovely and worth reading anyway. I've never read any of her novels, but I definitely recommend reading this.(less) "

Eric read and liked Lobstergirl's review of Saturday:

"Godawful.

"Saturday" was ponderous, labored, rhetorically thick and therefore perhaps to my mind pretentious, or do I mean pompous? It was like a big bloated beer gut, but a beer gut bloated - indeed, rendered distended, turgid, ...more Godawful.

"Saturday" was ponderous, labored, rhetorically thick and therefore perhaps to my mind pretentious, or do I mean pompous? It was like a big bloated beer gut, but a beer gut bloated - indeed, rendered distended, turgid, and tumescent - by the finest chardonnays, Gewurztraminers, and Sauvignon Blancs, sipped (quaffed?) while listening to Bach Partitas. It was bereft of conciseness, brevity, midgetude, terseness, laconism, abbreviation, and pith, its rather meaningless, hollow sentences curled around each other like vines choking a tree trunk, maybe a turkey oak. Paragraphs wended, labyrinthinely, toward a ridiculous and pat conclusion. Even when things happened, they were narrated along with the protagonist's meandering thoughts - and by thoughts, I mean those electrical impulses traveling from synapse to synapse between the neurons and glial cells in the nodes of the brain - as he moved through that last day of the week, also known as Saturday. This is how I would describe the book if I were writing in the style of, say, Ian McEwan.
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Eric read and liked A's review of La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (Les Rougon-Macquart, #5):

"In English translation, Patrey. (Prentice-Hall 1969).

The weirdest Rougon-Macquart novel I've read so far. In three parts: one, Father Mouret is the parish priest of Artauds in the countryside (where everyone is named Artaud and horrible);...more In English translation, Patrey. (Prentice-Hall 1969).

The weirdest Rougon-Macquart novel I've read so far. In three parts: one, Father Mouret is the parish priest of Artauds in the countryside (where everyone is named Artaud and horrible); two, the priest recovers from deep illness/madness and recapitulates the Eden story from Genesis and falls in love; three, Mouret returns to his decrepit church and deals with 'la faute,' and hallucinates some more.

We get to live in Mouret's head most of the novel, which is pretty cool. Some highlights include plants coming to life, barn animals eating each other, and grand religious visions of the Virgin Mary and of Mother Nature tearing down Mouret's church. And there's a wonderful homage to Reservoir Dogs that I can't bring myself to spoil for y'all.

But definitely the least 'scientific' and most 'hierophanic' of the Rougon-Macquart I've dealt with thus far. And I like that the priest is a person instead of a trope.(less) "