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Relocation
For the foreseeable future, due to the technical difficulties associated with this site, I'll be shifting all my book reviews to Goodreads. My page there is https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/32413649-timons-esaias and I'll be carrying on pretty much as normal. My one caveat is that I don't think I'll be giving star ratings to volumes of poetry. ( Read more... ) -
McSweeney's #46
The 41st book of the year, and the last I'll be reviewing here (for the time being, anyway), is the latest volume of McSweeney's, specifically McSweeney's No 46: Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America.
From the subtitle (and the previous volume of McSweeney's) you might guess that this is a reprint anthology. Instead, they solicited ( Read more... ) -
The Three Fates
The 40th book of the year so far is a translation from the French, by a Vietnamese writer, Linda Lê (whose family left Vietnam for France when she was about 14.). The English title is The Three Fates, and I picked it up because I was told that Lê was the Vietnamese writer to read (she is critically acclaimed in literary circles), and I was ( Read more... ) -
Leaf and Tendril
The latest John Burroughs collection I have finished is the 1908 volume called Leaf and Tendril. This volume consists of reflections on science and natural history, including some discussions of evolution. I was amused to see that several of the topics were nearly identical to those in the Stephen Jay Gould collection I recently finished, as ( Read more... ) -
A Light in the Attic
My wife and I have been reading Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic as a bedtime ritual; a light verse to end the day on. I wasn't raised on Silverstein, so this is actually the first volume of his I've ever gone through.
Silverstein was clearly one of the favorites of my Poetry Writing students, as many of them brought in ( Read more... ) -
The Royal Game
I've had a copy of the Compass Books edition of Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game (the link takes you to a collection with two more stories in it than my old 1959 paperback) on my to-be-read shelf for probably three decades. When the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel brought his name back into public attention, I decided it might be time to finally ( Read more... ) -
Goodreads
I've set up a Goodreads page at https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/32413649-timons-esaias but I'm only just getting started over there. Will probably be joint-posting while I get familiar with their system. -
Helmet for my Pillow
My wife read Robert Leckie's classic memoir of World War II, Helmet for my Pillow, subtitled From Parris Island to the Pacific, right after the Spielberg's miniseries The Pacific brought it to our attention. I hadn't had time to read it before I taught the World War II class, and used Eugene Sledge's memoir instead. (I think I'd still make ( Read more... ) -
Year's Best SF 18
The Year's Best SF 18, edited by David G. Hartwell, was a distinct pleasure to read. The pleasure began with the very first story, "Old Paint." Megan Lindholm tells the story of a family that inherits grandpa's old car, a woody-style station wagon, whose technology is way behind the times. Mom even makes her teenager learn to drive it, ( Read more... ) -
The Hollow-Eyed Angel
The book I took to WPF Residency this June was Janwillem van de Wetering's penultimate Grijpstra & DeGier mystery novel, The Hollow-Eyed Angel. My review of the previous volume indicated that Grijpstra, DeGier and the commissaris had all retired, and that I found that the retirements undermined the nature of the series. Imagine my confusion ( Read more... )