Briefly Noted
Books I've read in the past few months:
Lucky Jim, Kingsley AmisMentioned before. Fairly entertaining, but the sexual politics of two generations ago just don't hold up that well as a topic for humor. (Cf. The Age of Innocence, where sexual mores of the past still resonate as a subject of tragedy. Or maybe Wharton's just a better writer than Amis.)
Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Mary Gaitskill I bought this because it was claimed to be about sex and Objectivism, two things I enjoy reading about, and while it was, more or less, it spent too much time on backstory and not enough exploring the interaction of the title characters, the ostensible center of the story. Also most of the sex was by implication, which is just a cop-out.
The Escape, Adam Thirlwell. The life and death of a randy septuagenerian. Reads like an extra chapter of Ulysses, albeit without the inimitable Joyce prose. (Probably also resembles late-period Roth, which I haven't read.)
The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason In a nice segue from the previous, this is forty-four variations on Homer in classical postmodernist (or Borgesian) style. As both the introduction and the New Yorker review point out, it's fascinating to realize that in the original Odyssey, most of the text consists of a story told by Odysseus to the Phaecians; the same Odysseus who is repeatedly described as a pathological liar (or as my HS translation had it, "indefatigable fabulist"). This makes Odysseus the original unreliable narrator, which is a great way to examine the original text and a fun jumping-off point for Mason.
The Snakehead, Patrick R. Keefe Nonfiction about the industry of smuggling Chinese (more specifically Fujianese) into this country. Some interesting sociology, but not as compelling as I was led to believe.
Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace. Various bits of reportage by DFW from a week with the McCain (2000) campaign, to a review of a Dostoevsky biography and one on English usage, to a porn convention. Highly recommended.
Lucky Jim, Kingsley AmisMentioned before. Fairly entertaining, but the sexual politics of two generations ago just don't hold up that well as a topic for humor. (Cf. The Age of Innocence, where sexual mores of the past still resonate as a subject of tragedy. Or maybe Wharton's just a better writer than Amis.)
Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Mary Gaitskill I bought this because it was claimed to be about sex and Objectivism, two things I enjoy reading about, and while it was, more or less, it spent too much time on backstory and not enough exploring the interaction of the title characters, the ostensible center of the story. Also most of the sex was by implication, which is just a cop-out.
The Escape, Adam Thirlwell. The life and death of a randy septuagenerian. Reads like an extra chapter of Ulysses, albeit without the inimitable Joyce prose. (Probably also resembles late-period Roth, which I haven't read.)
The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason In a nice segue from the previous, this is forty-four variations on Homer in classical postmodernist (or Borgesian) style. As both the introduction and the New Yorker review point out, it's fascinating to realize that in the original Odyssey, most of the text consists of a story told by Odysseus to the Phaecians; the same Odysseus who is repeatedly described as a pathological liar (or as my HS translation had it, "indefatigable fabulist"). This makes Odysseus the original unreliable narrator, which is a great way to examine the original text and a fun jumping-off point for Mason.
The Snakehead, Patrick R. Keefe Nonfiction about the industry of smuggling Chinese (more specifically Fujianese) into this country. Some interesting sociology, but not as compelling as I was led to believe.
Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace. Various bits of reportage by DFW from a week with the McCain (2000) campaign, to a review of a Dostoevsky biography and one on English usage, to a porn convention. Highly recommended.