I. Older reading

I finally finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It's difficult to know what to say about the book, how to approach the task of reviewing it. It's difficult in part because the book is huge, sprawling, complicated, and messy. And because so much as been said (and said so passionately) about the book already--Franzen is ( Read more... )

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Why do I feel like my life has been consumed lately? Where does all my time go? Why do feel like I have so much going on? I've been trying to get this post up for days now, but I haven't even had the chance to sit down and write a simple review. What's the deal? Fortunately it appears that my Thrusday night student is standing me up (Surprise ( Read more... )

1. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: Early in this book there is a passage in which a butler named Stevens, after looking out on gently rolling fields broken by hedges and dotted with sheep, muses thus:

I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopedias ( Read more... )

I loved The Corrections. I loved the way I had moments of empathy with even the least sympathetic characters. I loved the fact that large sections of it were set in Philadelphia and I loved the accuracy of Franzen's description of the city. I loved the tiny little connections between the different sections of the book, things you really needed ( Read more... )

I'm about halfway through The Corrections, and I'm really enjoying it. The characters are highly exaggerated, yet I find myself believing in them and even feeling sympathetic toward them. I'm particularly fond of Chip, despite the fact that he's literature's most self-involved fuckup since Rabbit Angstrom. Franzen has an amazing ability to get ( Read more... )

I finished How to Be Alone. Interestingly, I suddenly got much more involved in it after my last post. Somehow the cumulative effect of all the essays gave me a very intimate sense of Franzen's personality, and as I neared the end of the book I began to feel closer and closer to him. And I decided that I really like him. I like his ( Read more... )

I am still reading Franzen's How to Be Alone. Progress is slow. The essays are interesting, and Franzen's writing is extremely readable, but as usual I need some kind of narrative to really draw me in. The essays that I find most interesting are those about writing and reading, the audience for literature, and literature's place in society and ( Read more... )

I'm at work, so I don't have a whole lot of time, but I wanted to briefly make note of two very interesting articles that I read recently. Both were from the New Yorker, and both were from the same issue, although I unfortunately do not remember which issue it was. The first one that I read was a long piece by Jonathan Franzen dealing with ( Read more... )