“Just once, he thought, I’d like to know whose side I’m really on in something like this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with concentrated nobility––such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver’s vacant-looking eyes––facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute force and brute intelligence) trying to […]
Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read; I don’t quite know what to make of it. This is my first Jackson novel, and it’s clear that she is a talented writer. I did not, however, find myself satisfied by this particular story. We Have […]
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera compares human lives to musical compositions. He writes of two lovers whose “musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them” (89). Kundera contents himself with cataloging a “short dictionary” of words the two lovers […]
With legalization gaining steam across the nation, it seems we are about to close the chapter on cannabis prohibition in the long, sordid history of America’s “War on Drugs.” The question is no longer “Will we have full legalization?” but “How soon?” There will no doubt continue to be heated debates about cannabis’s place in […]
“In February, the door of his English class opened and a toad in a red cape walked in. Grublike face. Pasty sheen, sparse hair. A round of snickers. The little man swirled the cape off his shoulders, wrote Denton Thrasher on the chalkboard. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them, his face was […]
This is one of the strangest and most disappointing books I’ve ever read. Reaching back to 12th-century Britain, The Pillars of the Earth vividly describes the architecture, landscapes, and challenges faced by denizens of the Middle Ages. Sadly, this potentially great project is brought low by Ken Follett’s shockingly poor writing. Follett combines the deep […]
Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening has the look of a graphic novel, but it’s actually a group of interrelated philosophical essays presented in comic book form. This stunning work of art presents a gauntlet of brain-teasers that challenge our assumptions about the nature of human perception and understanding. Sousanis’s central message––that we should learn to see from […]
Two hundred or so pages in, I had high hopes for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The novel grabbed me right from the start, showing all the signs of another brilliant yarn from one of the UK’s most talented living authors. Mitchell has a unique gift for inhabiting the minds of different narrators, and for […]
“For the Vinny Costellos of the world, love is bullshit they murmur into your ear to get sex. For girls––me, anyway––sex is what you do on page one to get to the love that’s later on in the book.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 70 “‘Power is lost or won, never created […]
After being blown away last year by Hanya Yangihara’s second novel, A Little Life, I resolved to read her debut as well. In many ways, it’s hard to imagine two stories that have less in common. But both books are clearly the product of an intellect sharpened with the language of disgust and brutality. Yanagihara’s […]