So on to happier posts ( Read more... )

So we were without water here for 24 hours, after my parents' laundry room and the sun room flooded. Giant snow drifts kept us trapped indoors for 48 hours. So yeah, I've had better holidays.

It's given me a lot of time to read, though. I finished Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins.

( Book review follows )

I finished Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It was a brilliant novel. At first the pacing seemed odd -- too breathless -- until I discovered that (true to its 19th-century style) it was originally published in weekly instalments in a newspaper. Probably, also, it's that Chabon is used to writing 500-page novels, not 200-page ones ( Read more... )

Alas, Lucy Maud Montgomery has been usurped. The former best chapter title in the English language -- "Matthew insists on puffed sleeves" -- has been trounced by the title of the ninth chapter in Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road:

"On the Anxieties Arising from the Impermissibility, However Unreasonable, of an Elephant's Rounding Out a ( Read more... )

You know, most of the time, when critics say that an author is primarily interested in exploring "Jewish history, identity, and culture" in a book, it's generally safe to assume that it will either be a) a moving, tragic narrative of survival, generally around the holocaust, or b) a slow-paced story of a woman trying to reconcile who own largely ( Read more... )

So I finally finished Moby-Dick, and I have to say it was 120 pages of the best novel 19th-Century America produced. Too bad it was 620 pages long.

Some thoughts:

• He's really good at creating characters and painting scenes. He's terrible at dialogue, editing, and plotting. The initial scenes of the inn, the church, and Ishmael's first night ( Read more... )

Come; let us squeeze hands all around; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm forever!
------ Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Chapter 94
The "sperm" here is the spermaceti oil of the Sperm Whale. I'd say the mind-in ( Read more... )

"Hurrah for gold cup of sperm, my boys!"
...
"So, so, so, then;--softly, softly! That's it--that's it! long and strong."
...
"There's a hogshead of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand!"
--- from "The First Lowering," Chapter 48 of ( Read more... )

It's been a quiet week. I've been even more in my shell than usual lately -- just feeling introverted. I'm sorry for having disappeared entirely from cyberspace in that time. I'm feeling flu-ish today, and the weather outside is balmy -- -15 Celsius downtown, going down to -38 Celsius (no windchill) in some of the suburbs.

I've been reading ( Read more... )

Final count of the re-write: 122,024 words and 231 pages ( Read more... )