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March 14
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Will
read and liked
Caitlin's
review of Ancient Evenings:
"As the reviews below suggest, this will be a 1 star or a 5 star for you, but unlikely to be anything much in between. I adore Mailer - for his cockiness, his absolute conviction of his own brilliance, for the sentences whose structure make me drop m...more
As the reviews below suggest, this will be a 1 star or a 5 star for you, but unlikely to be anything much in between. I adore Mailer - for his cockiness, his absolute conviction of his own brilliance, for the sentences whose structure make me drop my jaw and laugh, for insight, and for buggery. Who else could write a sprawling Egyptian epic stuffed with filth of roaches and make it so thoroughly mine? I love this best of all he's written and think about it more than the rest combined. God help me if I can tell you exactly why. This book made me feel like a kid again - needing to turn one more page.
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January 10
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Will
gave
 
to:
The Road (Hardcover)
by Cormac McCarthy
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Will said:
"I spent the greater part of this book enjoying it skeptically. There's no doubt about the power of McCarthy's sentences, but his characters have a humorless "everyman" feel and he can't write women plausibly. The last sequence in the book m...more
I spent the greater part of this book enjoying it skeptically. There's no doubt about the power of McCarthy's sentences, but his characters have a humorless "everyman" feel and he can't write women plausibly. The last sequence in the book moved me so completely, though, that I closed it with tears in my eyes. It ends very beautifully and hopefully, I think - which seems absolutely impossible given the premise, but that's good writing....less
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New comment on Lisa's review of
The Feast of Love
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Will
read and liked
Lisa's
review of The Feast of Love:
"I fell instantly for this book -- the writing is lovely and clear, and Baxter's images and metaphors are startling and precise.
But then he moves away from these vignettes of people's love lives and their deep but funny meditations on them. He na...more
I fell instantly for this book -- the writing is lovely and clear, and Baxter's images and metaphors are startling and precise.
But then he moves away from these vignettes of people's love lives and their deep but funny meditations on them. He narrows the novel to a fairly dramatic ending, and even though this brings several of the previously unrelated characters together, it felt as though we were losing voices instead of gaining or synthesizing them. I still very much enjoyed the book as a whole, but it was a little disappointing to go from such a fantastic, rich beginning to a less rewarding, more simplistic end.
Also, some of the repeated ruminations were, basically, "all you need is love," and the characters could occasionally border on quirky rather than complex. These characteristics made me think that Charles Baxter could be a little too Francesca Lia Block or Tom Robbins for me, with funky love magic covering all ills. I've heard that people don't like his other books as much as this one, so maybe there's something to that. Or maybe it's that this is such a definitive novel that it would be difficult for anyone to follow it up -- once you've laid out your entire philosophy of life in exquisite prose, what do you do next?...less
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January 05
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Will
is currently reading:
The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War (Penguin Classics)
by Jaroslav Hasek
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Will
gave
to:
A Room of One's Own (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Virginia Woolf
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Will said:
"Brilliantly crafted essay with evocative poetic interludes. A Room of One's Own is often read through the eyes of "history" -- as a precursor to contemporary identity politics. However, without shortchanging its historical importance, Woo...more
Brilliantly crafted essay with evocative poetic interludes. A Room of One's Own is often read through the eyes of "history" -- as a precursor to contemporary identity politics. However, without shortchanging its historical importance, Woolf's arguments are still very much valuable in themselves. (I was especially struck by how focused Woolf is upon the question of aesthetic value, which has become a taboo topic in literary studies.) She approaches her essay with a scope and freshness that can only exist at the beginning of a movement, before it has been chopped up and delineated and editorialized. As such, her essay serves as much to rejuvenate and challenge calcified and comfortable forms of contemporary feminism as it does to show such feminism its roots.
This may feel like a book that you don't have to read because it's already sort of "in the water." You do; it isn't....less
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December 26
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Will
gave
to:
Lucky Jim (Penguin Classics)
by Kingsley Amis
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Will said:
"A smart, smart, funny book. Humor always lies in precision and detail, and Amis describes physiological suffering and boredom with uncanny exactness. The novel is also well-plotted, without any clunkiness until the end (where, as with too many very...more
A smart, smart, funny book. Humor always lies in precision and detail, and Amis describes physiological suffering and boredom with uncanny exactness. The novel is also well-plotted, without any clunkiness until the end (where, as with too many very funny books, the author rolls up his sleeves and gets to the work of suspense-building). His characterizations, even in the wholesale satire of Professor Welch, are complicated and rich -- except for the women. Though Margaret is intriguingly inconsistent, there's no discernible psychology in her, and no genuine interest in either the protagonist or the author to explore her perspective. And Jim is, perhaps, a bit too lucky after all -- as rewards for his honest cynicism fall into his lap like manna....less
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December 20
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Will
gave
to:
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Paperback)
by John R. Searle
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Will said:
"Still the benchmark of speech act theory. More accurately, this book marks the transition of speech act theory from the speculative observations of Austin and others to the rigorous field it's since become.
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