More Greene
So sayeth one of Graham Greene’s priests – “Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct.” (A Burnt-Out Case, pg. 191, Penguin)
Category: Reading
What is being read at the moment.
Eye Pouches
Graham Greene buried this great description in the middle of a paragraph in A Burnt-Out Case: “The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of…
Co-opting the Alternative
Pynchon may be documenting the end of a specific era in American life in Inherent Vice, but there is a universal resonance in his description in which the mainstream co-opts…
Turn the Survey Inward
Philip K. Dick’s story “Survey Team” was so prescient for its time that it has completed the cycle and now seems passé. He sees a future where we are stuck…
Thoughts like Fish
Many awesome passages percolate up from the thick tome that is Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Picador Edition). “…[S]trange ideas would come to my head. Ideas that were like dead…
“Once a man started killing his wife…”
Here is another great line from Graham Greene, on page 67 of The Ministry of Fear (Penguin Classics): “…a kind of self-protective instinct would have made Mrs. Wilcox hate him….
Inundated with Similes
Karen Russell makes excessive use of similes throughout her book Swamplandia!, at least in the first half. Some are clever or insightful, such as “We were watching the small TV…
Reading “Cholera”
Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, like Midnight’s Children, was a long, hard slog, especially for one with a glacial reading pace. The text lives in thick…
More Borges
A few lines from Borges’ “The Shape of the Sword,” with eerily similar qualities to a recently cited line from Midnight’s Children: “Whatsoever one man does, it is as though…
Me Read Slow…
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of those books that sits unread on bookshelves. Even that first page, with his predilection for long, unbroken paragraphs, discourages a quick dip into…