by William Faulkner The more I read, the more I seem to catch while reading. It wasn’t until my second read-through of Naked Lunch that I really feel I began to appreciate it, and even the recent rereading of Animal Farm really made me feel that at least some of my study of literature is…
Read more
by George Orwell It’s been a while since I picked up Animal Farm, last in tenth grade, when they forced my class to read it. While I recall enjoying the story, I forgot about most of the finer details, so it seemed appropriate to revisit it. I hoped that, given my increased exposure to literature…
Read more
by Vendela Vida I hate talking about books I didn’t like, especially those that thoroughly disappointed me, like The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. It’s a difficult task to express such a thing effectively without being mean or, at least, discouraging, while remaining honest. It’s not even that this was necessarily the worst of the worst…
Read more
by P. G. Wodehouse Carry On, Jeeves was my first foray into the comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, and, I must say, I had no idea it could be this wonderful. The book is made up of a series of vignettes in which Bertram Wooster and his butler, Jeeves, work to help Bertie’s friends get…
Read more
by André Alexis I often go on about the best stories being the ones to elicit the strongest emotions, and probably the clearest indicator that an author has succeeded at this is by making me cry. Alexis’ novel is a unique case where this is concerned, not simply because he made me cry, but because…
Read more
by H. Leighton Dickson It was with great hesitation that I picked up To Journey in the Year of the Tiger. I, of course, kept an open mind, keeping the possibility that I would enjoy the story, but I was worried, mainly due to past experiences with self-published fantasy. Thankfully, I ended up enjoying Dickson’s…
Read more
by Anakana Schofield It’s been a while since I’ve been good and disturbed when reading, but to say that Schofield’s narrative about the mentally unbalanced public masturbator and exhibitionist accomplished what it, presumably, set out to do seems like it shouldn’t be at all surprising. The story follows Martin, a man who plans his day…
Read more
by Philip K. Dick It’s been a while since I read something that felt a bit dated. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came across that way, but for a very different reason; you could easily date Cuckoo’s Nest based on its writing style. A more fitting comparison to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?…
Read more
by Patrick deWitt When, in reading, I come across outlandish fantasies or nightmares relating to the plot, I often enjoy them immensely. I think back to Vonnegut’s Der Arme Dolmetscher: The protagonist’s heroic fantasy, made up with only the limited German phrases that he knew, absolutely made that story. In Gogol’s Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and…
Read more
by Kazuo Ishiguro Some authors tie everything up in a neat little package, leading the reader along a clear path through the narrative in their stories. Ishiguro is not one of those authors, or, at least, A Pale View of Hills is definitely not one of those stories. No, it comes across that way at…
Read more