by Marius Kociejowski Kociejowski greatly impressed me with Zoroaster’s Children. I’m reluctant to compare him with Christopher Hitchens, mainly because most people undergo an almost churlish transformation when I mention Hitchens, and the last thing I want to do is discourage reading of this exceptional book. However, I can’t think of any more fitting comparison…
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by John Milton I will have to make mention of my unfamiliarity with the style of language and literature, when approaching an epic poem the likes of Paradise Lost. This isn’t to say I had an impossible time understanding the Renaissance English; it just took me much longer to get through. (And, you know, the…
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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…
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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?…
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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…
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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…
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by Christian Bӧk Coming at it from the perspective of a man that has a lot to learn when it comes to poetry, The Xenotext: Book 1 was quite lofty, and I found it at least some degrees of inaccessible. Luckily for me, Bӧk was kind enough to include explanations for his poems at the…
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by Ernest Zimmermann It may seem a stretch to believe that an intriguing statement was all it took to launch the late Ernest Zimmermann, then a history professor at Lakehead University, into countless hours of research and investigation that eventually led to the publishing of The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior, but that’s the…
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by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson After finishing Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration, I very quickly picked up my copy of Why Nations Fail, with the earnest intention of reading it soon-after, at the express recommendation of the author of the former. (Within his book, of course; I don’t know Ferguson, personally.) And then…
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by Darin Kennedy There are quite a few songs that spoke to me on a deep, visceral level, but never quite to the extent that music spoke to Darin Kennedy, who wrote a book as a result. And, I definitely can’t compete with Anthony Faircloth in Kennedy’s story, The Mussorgsky Riddle. I mean, he set…
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