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August 28
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New comment on Laurel's review of
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
(see all 8 comments)
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August 14
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Emily
gave
 
to:
Ethan Frome (Paperback)
by Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Ammons (foreword)
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Emily said:
"Never believe what the back of a book says about a novel. i did, but only because as I read i started yearning to know "what happens" and about halfway through i began dropping words and skimming through pages because it was so painful to ...more
Never believe what the back of a book says about a novel. i did, but only because as I read i started yearning to know "what happens" and about halfway through i began dropping words and skimming through pages because it was so painful to read its slow and detailed decline towards devastating hopelessness.. This book says that E.F. gave up his only chance to be happy and it was that choice that led him to be even more miserable then he he was before he knew he options.
i disagree. E. Frome never had a fair shot. He was tied to despair from the start and his dying mother (and his own male inadequacies) left him with little to hope for. He cut his loses and took the fast route out by marrying a capable woman sure to shoulder his share of life's burdens. Only soon this burden becomes too much for her to bear and he turns to obsessive romantic fantasies for relief from the reality his wife can't structure for him.
But what does he say of this love he is fixated on? Mostly how his ability to steer the clueless little fawn into action by the mere hint of authority in his voice causes blood to rush through his otherwise dead veins. And the way her blind trust in him makes his masculinity thrive even as he knows the appearance will shatter as soon as he's called to task.
In the end, so paralyzed by his desire to take a hold of a fantasy he never planned out, he fails to act on the simplest request - to take the poor girl out of her misery. Instead he fixes the threesome to a life of whiling away their hours in joint misery. Although what more can you except from a life in Starkfield?
The back of the book should say that E.Frome tell us that while marriage and social class may be the worst of all circumstances in which to live and plan, true love will never deliver.
New Word: facetious = frivolous
...less
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August 08
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Emily
read and liked
Michael's
review of Dhalgren:
"This book is a whole world, part of the constellation of works that help me navigate my intellectual life. It's about the 60s, but it's also about metafiction, about solitude, and about that strange feeling when the dull and the surreal merge (late, ...more
This book is a whole world, part of the constellation of works that help me navigate my intellectual life. It's about the 60s, but it's also about metafiction, about solitude, and about that strange feeling when the dull and the surreal merge (late, late at night. when life has gotten one step too strange. when one more trudge down the street puts you into a reverie where you feel utterly lost).
In it, a nameless guy with a faulty memory (that's why he's nameless--though otherwise his recall is excellent, he forgets vast stretches of time and loses days, weeks, even years of his life) who gets called the Kid steps into a bizarre city where something has happened to bring its population down to 1,000 or so misfits who don't do much but gossip, the sky is covered in strange clouds and you never see the sun, two moons appear at night, and time sometimes runs differently for different people. He's searching for his name, and also something else, but his memory is so bad that he can't even remember that much. He finds a journal, snippets of which seem to tell his own story in advance, and starts to write his own story in the marginalia. He joins gangs, has lots and lots of unusual sex before and during his membership in a curious and sort of unsettling poly triad, becomes a poet but might just be plagiarizing the journal, and basically becomes the mythic center of everyone's life by sheer accident. Like Finnegans Wake, it has a sentence that wraps the end back into the beginning, and just like that book, there's a really strong reason to do so. As much as anything, though, it just has some gorgeous descriptions and an incredible mood, not to mention some musings on solitude, the mythologization of life, and the creation of art that are really cool.
Not to be forgotten, and precisely the fulcrum where Delany was writing both in and out of the genre pigeonhole from every direction he could. Fantastic, and neither as sometimes clunky as his earlier work or didactic as his later work (not that I don't love both, in their own ways). This one, he's content to just let be, in all its 800 page glory....less
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July 17
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New comment on Jessica's review of
Fear of Flying
(see all 25 comments)
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July 04
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Emily
gave
to:
Housekeeping: A Novel (Paperback)
by Marilynne Robinson
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Emily said:
"In a wash of emotion Marilynne Robinson writes a soothing story about the slow but insistent separation between the self and the social. Is it the train wreck of a family history that makes one long to be alienated from all familiarity, or is it a c...more
In a wash of emotion Marilynne Robinson writes a soothing story about the slow but insistent separation between the self and the social. Is it the train wreck of a family history that makes one long to be alienated from all familiarity, or is it a choice made every time you leave? I read this one with a dictionary by my side. Favorite phrases include when granda "eschews awakening" (that's short for death and no I didn't have to look that up) and the lake that "seals" over when winter comes, just days after it swallowed up a train full of people. Favorite big moments include a description of Noah's neighbors who must have thought he was crazy to build a make a home look like a boat - until the flood came that is. Thanks James!...less
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June 25
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Emily
marked as to-read:
The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (Paperback)
by Angela Carter
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Emily said:
"From Alan Moore:
It’s like when you’ve got people like Angela Carter who, in her book The Sadeian Women, she admitted that there was the possibility she could imagine a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was beautiful, ...more
From Alan Moore:
It’s like when you’ve got people like Angela Carter who, in her book The Sadeian Women, she admitted that there was the possibility she could imagine a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was beautiful, and which didn’t have the problems that she saw in a lot of other pornography. I think even Andrea Dworkin said the same thing. She said it a bit more grudgingly, but she said that conceivably there was, there could be, a benign form of pornography but she didn’t personally believe that it would ever happen. So that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to say, yes, good pornography can exist, and I think that possibly the fact that we called it pornography wrong-footed a lot of the people who, if we’d have come out and said, “well, this is a work of art,” they would have probably all said, “no it’s not, it’s pornography.” So because we’re saying, “this is pornography,” they’re saying, “no it’s not, it’s art,” and people don’t realise quite what they’ve said....less
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New comment on Jessica's review of
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
(see all 18 comments)
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May 28
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Emily
gave
to:
The Reader (Hardcover)
by Bernhard Schlink
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Emily said:
"It took me more then one try to get into this one but once i made it past the first sex scene i was hooked. This story begins with an affair between a fifteen year old boy and a thirty something year old women and then doubles back to matters more s...more
It took me more then one try to get into this one but once i made it past the first sex scene i was hooked. This story begins with an affair between a fifteen year old boy and a thirty something year old women and then doubles back to matters more serious and complex. If I knew this book was about the Holocaust at all, I wouldn't have picked it up. But then I also went to Berlin without going to the Holocaust museum. And I've never seen Schindler's List.
The Reader is able to address the Holocaust with both distance and discomfort. The narrator is a German coming to terms with the action of his parents generation - a weight my Jewish American family can't bear to acknowledge. My interest in German culture has always been more attuned to what German kids are like, rather then the country's identity. This book lets you in and even uses the Holocaust to discuss more general themes like alienation, fate, and the moral responsibility in love. Sarah - you get it next!...less
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March 31
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New comment on Jessica's review of
Out: A Novel
reply to this comment
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