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Tag Archives: classics
Book Review: Stoner by John Williams
When I was a kid I use to walk through graveyards. I’d search for the oldest headstones and longest lived lying beneath them. I remember running charcoal across crumbled paper in order to decipher those too weathered and beaten to … Continue reading
Posted in Book Review, fiction
Tagged american literature, classics, college, Education, Existentialism, humanity, John Edward Williams, John Williams, literary fiction, Love, perfection, Stoner, World War I
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Book Review: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow back in high school. It was Halloween and as all teachers strive to tie literature to something relevant in their students’ lives, mine did the same. I didn’t remember it. I remember being … Continue reading
Book Review: Naked Lunch: The Restored Text by William S. Burroughs
Sanguine poetry dressed in the sex and suffering of addiction. That’s how I wish I could describe Naked Lunch. Addiction is horrifying. Worse than any disease, more debilitating than any ordinary suffering, it is the surrender of one’s identity to … Continue reading
Posted in Book Review, fiction
Tagged addiction, allen ginsberg, beat generation, beatnik, classics, drugs, essays, heroin, homosexuality, jack kerouac, Naked Lunch, obscenity, William S. Burroughs
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Book Review: The Human Factor by Graham Greene
The Human Factor is an understated, viscerally affecting book that manages to show a side of espionage largely ignored by the other giants of the genre. It takes the soft side of spy work and puts it under a … Continue reading
Posted in Book Review, fiction
Tagged british literature, classics, Espionage, Graham Greene, morality, mystery, Spy, The Human Factor, Thriller, treason
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Book Review: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
‘No one reads Arthur Clarke for his characters; you read it for his ideas.’ This is the mantra I keep hearing with a lot of the big three in sci-fi. I can get behind that provided the ideas are big … Continue reading
Book Review: The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
The best books capture a piece of the world while pickling and preserving it within the brine of the author’s experience. Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities works beautifully around this ad-hoc literary theory. It is a story of segregation and … Continue reading
Book Review: Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
Reinterpreting Shakespeare is one of those things that seems obvious on paper, I mean Shakespeare himself borrowed large swaths of his ideas of those that came before him, so turning it into a cycle is an obvious get. The problem … Continue reading
Posted in Book Review, fiction
Tagged Classic Retellings, classics, fantasy, grief, Hag-Seed, Hogarth Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, prison, Revenge, Shakespeare, The Tempest, theatre
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Book Review: The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
After World War II, as one can imagine, Germany was in something of a bind when it came to moving forward. What is the correct way to move forward after an all but global rebuttal to the government of Hitler’s … Continue reading
Book Review: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Reading this book is like learning to speak another language. It is frustrating, illusive, and so densely furnished in its culture as to feel utterly inscrutable. The first part of the book attempts to teach you, albeit impatiently. It gives … Continue reading
Posted in Book Review, fiction
Tagged bollywood, classics, historical fiction, India, literary fiction, Magical Realism, Memory, Midnight's Children, Pakistan, Salman Rushdie, suffering, super powers, truth
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Book Review: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
This book should have been easy. I say this with hindsight, with the whole of the apocalyptic genre between myself and it. It should have been easy to follow the last man. It’s episodic, almost self-written. Lonely, thrilling, philosophical, introspective, … Continue reading
A Land of Rum and Writing 