by Sean Penn Well, this one’s awkward. Awkward’s probably the best way to describe it succinctly, anyway, and here I thought I’d be leaning more toward “weird” after reading what it’s about. By day, Bob Honey’s a septic tank salesman whose business savvy apparently allowed him to corner the Jehovah’s Witness slice of that market….
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by Michael Ondaatje Warlight is a story about a young teen’s formative years in England immediately after WWII, but it’s more complicated than that. Our narrator, Nathaniel, looks back to when his parents, sent to Asia for a work position, left his older sister and him in the care of their secretive lodger. They start…
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by Robert Frost Some poetry collections feel well ahead of their time when you’re in the midst of them. I remember being hit with this in the middle of Ezra Pound’s Cathay––that the author created something unique by moving away from rigidity within the poems but still maintaining a cohesive flow that came with inserting…
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by Denis Johnson Here’s another one I’ve been putting off for a while. I shouldn’t have. I mean, it came highly recommended by someone whose opinion I trust, but it’s a short story collection, and for reasons I recently touched on, I’ve been a bit reluctant to do short stories lately. That said, it’s nice…
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by Michael Ondaatje I needed this. It’s easy to feel a bit low after coming away from a couple books disappointed when I originally approached them with high hopes. While I may be repeating myself here slightly, my mood turns around fairly quickly after reading something thoroughly enjoyable, and it becomes doubly satisfying when I…
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by Liz Harmer I find it interesting to consider what influences your opinion of a book while reading. The big thing that spurred this thought along was a passage in The Amateurs where the protagonist, Marie, realizes how starkly unique she is just before discussing architecture influenced by architecture influenced by architecture. (I won’t directly…
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by Chigozie Obioma Some time ago, I was discussing literature with a friend, when the topic turned to the comparison of Kevin Hardcastle’s writing to Cormac McCarthy’s in numerous blurbs and reviews, and how such an exercise usually sets him up for unreasonable expectations that tend to be crushed in due course. At the time,…
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Rubáiyát are tetrastichs, independent stanzas, each composed of four lines of near equal length. In their traditional form, all except the third line rhymes, though, occasionally, all lines of the verse rhyme. Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát are probably the most famous poems written in the form, though they were obscure in the Western world until Edward…
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by Noam Chomsky Presented with a massive sale on a large number of Noam Chomsky books, I recently found myself the proud owner of about a billion of them, so expect them to crop up in my reviews periodically, at least for the foreseeable future. (It was kind of hard to decide which of his…
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by Jonathan Safran Foer Everything is Illuminated is autobiographical, but only a touch, only superficially. It’s about a character named Jonathan Safran Foer travelling to Ukraine with only an old picture to help him find a woman who may have helped save his grandfather from the Nazis. This much actually happened, but I understand that…
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