William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner

This book caused quite a controversy when it came out in 1967, and judging from some of the reviews on LibraryThing and Amazon, it's continuing to do so. I didn't know about any of that when I started it, but the more I read the novel, the more dissatisfying and even irresponsible it started to seem.

Some ( Read more... )

In the afterword, Chabon jokes that the working title for this book was "Jews with Swords," which elicited chuckles from those privy to his writing process, as they were unable to appreciate the thought of Jews fighting with swords. This seems very appropriate, as it brings together a variety of threads of Jewry that are little known to any but ( Read more... )

It starts with one man in a car who suddenly sees the world as a wall of white, and from him spreads throughout the country. It's instantaneous and like a basilisk's stare, afflicts all those that the blind gaze upon. Those first few are quarantined in a previously closed asylum, and among them is the one person who has not lost her sight, which ( Read more... )

Sangamon Taylor used to do basic chemical analysis. After a jogger brings in a sample of toxic psychedelic soil, he ends with with a direct action environmentalist group which puts chemical companies into bankruptcy by exposing their toxic spills to the media. It's all pretty humdrum and routine, right down to the media circuses he generates, ( Read more... )

Oedipa Maas's ex-boyfriend is dead, and she has been named executor. She must leave her ordinary life and drive to San Narciso. While there, she uncovers what may be a centuries old worldwide conspiracy between rival post systems, or perhaps an undiagnosed paranoia within herself, causing her to see connections and conspiracies where none exist, ( Read more... )

The narrator is a priest, giving his dying rant, telling about his childhood, literary aspirations, and his time in Pinochet's Chile ( Read more... )

I want to start off by saying

THIS BOOK HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SHITTY TOM CRUISE MOVIE!Now, to review. Ludo is a prodigy. By the age of five, he's mastered six languages, handles college level math without a care, and is a handful. His mother, Sybilla, struggles to raise him, and in between these struggles, obsessively watches The Seven ( Read more... )

It's the near future. The United States exists as a rump state, just another statelet competing with Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, New South Africa, and the Mafia. Going through this mess, just trying to make a living by delivering pizza and selling information to the Central Intelligence Company in Langley are Hiro Protagonist, and YT, Kourier ( Read more... )

Mike Carey is a name you know if you like comics, because the man's a fucking genius. It turns out he's also written a series of novels, and The Devil You Know is the first. Fix Castor is an exorcist in London, and he's never short on work. After all, the dead have started to rise, coming back as ghosts, zombies, and the werekind. Despite a ( Read more... )

Nicola Barker, Darkmans

From Chaucer to Dickens, the county of Kent has always had a surprisingly prominent place in English literature. As a Kent boy myself, it's good to note that right now the area is having something of an unremarked-upon literary renaissance, centred, of all the unlikely places, on the run-down wasteland that is East Kent. ( Read more... )