2010 – what I should have learned…
After finishing Our Man in Havana with relative alacrity, and the resultant satisfaction that comes from a really good book, I am forced to contemplate the time wasted with other…
Tag: books
The end of “The End of the Affair”
The End of the Affair was simply a great book. I had avoided Graham Greene books up to this point. I do not know why since he is often associated…
The Reivers – Read It!
I recently finished reading William Faulkner’s The Reivers. It was an excellent book, highly recommended. Some great passages stood out in my mind: “…if all the human race ever stops…
Wastelands…
I, like so many others in the reading public, went through a Stephen King phase. It was in junior high for me, when I bought his books by the yard…
It’s all in a name…
I do not remember a time when the words “Skywalker” or “Alderaan” sounded nonsensical and silly. In fact, I don’t know if that time ever existed. They seem like perfectly…
Burgess’s Honey for the Bears
I recently finished reading Honey for the Bears, by Anthony Burgess. Of course his most famous work by far is A Clockwork Orange, although his other writing is highly regarded…
It always happens…
When you’re way way way way down at the bottom of the writing world, it seems every time you look up, there’s a luminary (or at least someone with better…
The Midwife Toad
The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler, focuses on the dispute between the neo-Darwin clan and Lamarckian proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The personal disputes that…
A Legacy of Annihiliation
Palahniuk takes an expansive approach to the culling song in his book Lullaby. For those who have not read the book, it features a bedtime poem, the recitation of which…
Damn that Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk does things that should not work. There is a quality to his writing that is prima facie absurd. It shouldn’t work. Kurt Vonnegut was the same way. It…