Campbell Andrews > Recent Status Updates

been hanging round the house awhile... finishing bc I have had a similar idea and I want to see how she executes it

Trying to imagine anybody who doesn't beat it to the punch in the first 7 pages.

So it's that kind of book.

This is almost one of the all-time greats, but (ironically) it bears too much the mark of our age.

Still: "Someone's kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease."

The second half of this book does not, I fear, work as well as the first.

I am not sure the central conceit can support so much weight.

the sheer amount of scholarship & verbiage produced about current events, since the rise of mass media, has already changed fiction- Saunders' novel is perhaps the first to realize this reality.

stunning: "four parallel blind-cast linear shadows creep across a sleeping tabby's midday flank"

Saunders is on such another level that it's a marvel I should feel the slightest encouragement to produce any fiction myself

of frivolous bachelors: "Terrified of boredom, they were prone to pranks."

not only does he incorporate other works in a surprising and audacious way, but I'm catching allusions- conceptually and thematically to C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, for one

I am already certain that this novel has set a new standard for historical fiction

so... whole chapters are excerpts from histories of the period? I am not even sure this is a novel at all.

I do not know how to read this book.

This is simultaneously thrilling and frustrating.

Bloom knows a good story and its best details- and there's more understanding of history here than in the New York Times newsroom.

Bloom knows a good story and its best details- and there's more understanding of history here than in the New York Times newsroom.

"human nature being what it is, the only way to get money to build rockets was to design rockets that killed people." heh heh, love it when Joe Bob peeks out

OK so I'm totally fascinated by the author, whose drive-in movie column (as Joe Bob Briggs) I used to read as a kid, who's been an actor (plays a key role in Scorsese's CASINO) and hosted TNT's MonterVision in the 90s, and who wrote for the Wittenberg Door, a defunct Christian satire publication. I'd want to read any story he thinks is worth telling.

this far in and I'm suspecting Mr. Sweterlitsch has an ax to grind...

I suspect Heller will always find a way to write about nature. Thankfully, he's good at it; and this coming from a reader and fellow human being who appreciates but is not particularly interested in the environment,...

There is a lot of incident in this book- and that is not a strict compliment, not as it boasts of itself on the back cover. But the heart of the book is the sibling relationship, and that— as a brother, yes —I feel keenly and sympathetically. And tragically.

oh wow, Chapter 16. as succinct a picture of contemporary corporate spirituality here in America as I've read.

ho boy, how many euphemisms for "blueberry" can he muster

Structurally I'm leery of it, but nevertheless he plunges you right in to both the power of vulnerability of doctoring, like a good medical thriller should

but just when I believe the author loves his characters, he goes and short-shrifts his most sympathetic one. too bad.

glad to be enjoying a book this much again

the Buddy sections are reminiscent of The Sound and The Fury