Peter's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 10 Apr 2025 20:58:10 -0700 60 Peter's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Poisonwood Bible 1803913 The Poisonwood Bible is the story of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

~from the back cover]]> 640 Barbara Kingsolver 0571201989 Peter 4 4.31 1998 The Poisonwood Bible
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Peter
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves:
review:
The terrible story of the Congo in the latter half of the 20th century- as if it hadn't suffered enough- told through the eyes of the four daughters of a missionary couple as they observe the various horrors of the times. You slowly get to know the girl's characters as they alternate the telling of the story of Africa through their own experiences in a tiny village over a couple of years and the effects of these events on the following decades. The ramifications of foreign policies citizens know nothing about, the cascading effects of small monstrous actions and trivial greed, and the misery imposed on millions by the ruthless and the stupid. The writing is very good in its mild, understated, patient and powerful way.
]]> Ulysses 13459142 735 James Joyce Peter 0 4.36 1922 Ulysses
author: James Joyce
name: Peter
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: currently-reading, own-tbr, paused
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Garland (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1)]]> 221550522 From Nobel Prize winning author Sigrid Undset, The Garland is a captivating coming-of-age story set to the vivid backdrop of 14th-century Norway. This classic romance novel is the first installment in the much-loved Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy.

Kristin Lavransdatter is the headstrong daughter of a noble Norwegian family who does her best to rebel against them at every opportunity. When she is sent to be straightened out at a nunnery, Kristin’s life alters forever, much to the horror of her father. Despite being betrothed to another, Kristin finds herself falling into the tangled web of an excommunicated member of the Catholic church.

Sigrid Undset weaves themes of corruption, religion, sin and forbidden love through a beautiful presentation of life in 14th century Norway. This historical fiction novel depicts a young girl’s struggle with faith and family obligation in a story that is still as relevant to modern-day life as it was when it was first published in 1920.

Republished by Read & Co. Books, The Garland is now in a new edition featuring an excerpt from Six Scandinavian Novelists by Alrik Gustafrom. This volume is a highly recommended read for fans of historical fiction and collectors of Sigrid Undset’s work.]]> 359 Sigrid Undset 1408680688 Peter 0 currently-reading 0.0 1920 The Garland (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1)
author: Sigrid Undset
name: Peter
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1920
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> THE EBONY TOWER 128156935 The Ebony Tower bring us once again into the company of a great contemporary novelist working his intriguing and dazzling themes, probing the fitful relationships of fantasy and reality, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And they are an enduring testament to John Fowles's reputation as one of the finest storytellers of our time.]]> 313 John Fowles Peter 4
So, onto The Ebony Tower� A successful painter/art teacher/writer/critic visits a famous painter at his home in France to write a biographical piece. As our visitor, David, drives towards his assignment he is content- with his career, his marriage and life, and the journey itself. Upon arrival at the ancient grand old house, apparently deserted during siesta, he wanders around savouring the extraordinary art his host has collected over a lifetime. David also comes across two naked young women, apparently the artist's muses, sunbathing. He goes back to the art quietly� As the house comes to life, his host awakes, and the two women don their clothes the four person dynamics begin, at first largely with the artist and David. Their initial interactions are polite with not much more than a little fencing. Come dinner however, as the host gets into the wine, things become considerably more edgy as the host vents his ire at all things not truely great. The entire genre of abstraction, David’s style of painting, is the main target of his spleen, specifically because he knows perfectly well of David’s work. Also at any compromise. David has to stomach this, and simultaneously try to understand the personal dynamics between the two women and his host. There is clearly something sexual - but in what way, and what else? Eventually they all three manage to get the drunken man to bed and head their own ways.
The dynamics really begin the following day, with a contrite host trying his best to make amends and provide David with the type of insights he seeks, mostly so the piece David is writing will in fact do him justice. The two women who also want something that develops over the remainder of the day that I shan’t describe but is the core of the tale. David’s complacency is shattered on this day, in every possible way. By the next day his old life is over. This is the most powerful part of the story, and very human. The gifted person seeing their talents and life in a new, vastly reduced but realistic perspective in comparison with greatness, or what could have been, was very well done, and definitely touched more than one personal nerve.

While not The Magus, it is a very fine short read. I wish it had grown into its own novel.]]> 4.00 1974 THE EBONY TOWER
author: John Fowles
name: Peter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves:
review:
My rating and review only address the title novella, The Ebony Tower, which is excellent. The book itself contains the novella and a set of short stories- not a genre I particularly like. I did read 2.5 of the additional tales but really didn’t enjoy those at all, so gave up. They are OK (except for the Celtic snow white tale), just not my thing.

So, onto The Ebony Tower� A successful painter/art teacher/writer/critic visits a famous painter at his home in France to write a biographical piece. As our visitor, David, drives towards his assignment he is content- with his career, his marriage and life, and the journey itself. Upon arrival at the ancient grand old house, apparently deserted during siesta, he wanders around savouring the extraordinary art his host has collected over a lifetime. David also comes across two naked young women, apparently the artist's muses, sunbathing. He goes back to the art quietly� As the house comes to life, his host awakes, and the two women don their clothes the four person dynamics begin, at first largely with the artist and David. Their initial interactions are polite with not much more than a little fencing. Come dinner however, as the host gets into the wine, things become considerably more edgy as the host vents his ire at all things not truely great. The entire genre of abstraction, David’s style of painting, is the main target of his spleen, specifically because he knows perfectly well of David’s work. Also at any compromise. David has to stomach this, and simultaneously try to understand the personal dynamics between the two women and his host. There is clearly something sexual - but in what way, and what else? Eventually they all three manage to get the drunken man to bed and head their own ways.
The dynamics really begin the following day, with a contrite host trying his best to make amends and provide David with the type of insights he seeks, mostly so the piece David is writing will in fact do him justice. The two women who also want something that develops over the remainder of the day that I shan’t describe but is the core of the tale. David’s complacency is shattered on this day, in every possible way. By the next day his old life is over. This is the most powerful part of the story, and very human. The gifted person seeing their talents and life in a new, vastly reduced but realistic perspective in comparison with greatness, or what could have been, was very well done, and definitely touched more than one personal nerve.

While not The Magus, it is a very fine short read. I wish it had grown into its own novel.
]]> <![CDATA[An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures]]> 53492652 Passion According to GH with a book that looks suspiciously like a romance novel?

In The Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector tries to discover how to bridge the gap between people, or how to even begin to try.

A woman struggles to emerge from solitude and sadness into love, including sexual love: her guide on this journey is Ulisses, who (yes) leads her patiently into the fullness of life.

The Apprenticeship was a bestseller and, as her biographer Benjamin Moser writes, "This accessible love story surprised many readers. When it came out, an interviewer said: 'I thought The Book of Pleasures was much easier to read than any of your other books. Do you think there’s any basis for that?' Clarice answered: 'There is. I humanized myself, the book reflects that.'”]]> 176 Clarice Lispector 0811230619 Peter 4 4.24 1969 An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Peter
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves:
review:
complex and mysterious- not an easy read. the dense, beautiful prose tells the story of a woman's struggle to understand and accept existence so she can truely experience selfless love. Being described as Lispector's most accessible novel intimidates me somewhat.
]]> Symposium 1052499 192 Muriel Spark 0395511011 Peter 3 3.77 1990 Symposium
author: Muriel Spark
name: Peter
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves:
review:
A solid 3.5. Not up to the standard of many of Spark's works, but as always the writing is fun. The tale circles around guests at a dinner party and their relationship/connection to particular diner that does not bode well for those that know her.
]]> Station Eleven 23593321 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 339 Emily St. John Mandel 1447268970 Peter 4
The many story lines tie together a bit too neatly, but in a very forgivable manner. Yes, it is a bit Hunger Gamesish, and yes, the combat parts are not very realistic with thrown knives always hitting throats and arrows piercing skulls etc., but I still enjoyed it.]]> 4.14 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Peter
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves:
review:
A good pandemic driven post-apocalypse novel. Many of the lives touched by a single person, an actor, are followed after, before and during the pandemic that melts down our civilization. The meaning of the word civilization is itself a theme, though subtle, and not pushy. More in the connections between strangers and non-strangers in an interconnected world. Just how impactful the recent pandemic could have been had covid been more deadly of course comes to mind in any non-delusional reader, but this isn't really the enjoyable part. One core set of characters are based within a traveling theatre/musician group that is a very nice post-apocalypse concept. The group provides a mobile civilization to its members and to the places and people it visits, quite an achievement. Counterbalancing this positive, religious kooks tilt what remains of society in the opposite direction, which cuts close to the bone in the current political meltdown.

The many story lines tie together a bit too neatly, but in a very forgivable manner. Yes, it is a bit Hunger Gamesish, and yes, the combat parts are not very realistic with thrown knives always hitting throats and arrows piercing skulls etc., but I still enjoyed it.
]]> Looking on darkness: A novel 134039282 0 André Brink Peter 4 The monstrous story of life under apartheid, even though this is I think my 4th Brink novel and the 2nd set in that era, is one of the most powerful elements, it's a shame the dialog and the theatre part let it down.]]> 4.00 1973 Looking on darkness: A novel
author: André Brink
name: Peter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves:
review:
The first half was excellent indeed, but the second lagged. Set in South Africa under apartheid, we start out with a black man, Joseph, in jail convicted of murdering his white girlfriend. Joseph tells his story melding his family history with his life story and parts of his murder trial. Over the course of the novel his story catches up with the present, in his jail cell. As mentioned, the last half was less good. The dialog was a bit stilted (a common theme with me of late), and the concept of revolution, or at least resistance and protest, through theatre of the kind described didn't really ring true. Why wouldn't they just leave was also a constant refrain. The love Jessica had for Joseph also came across as questionable... why? The ending was a surprise, which is good.
The monstrous story of life under apartheid, even though this is I think my 4th Brink novel and the 2nd set in that era, is one of the most powerful elements, it's a shame the dialog and the theatre part let it down.
]]> Biography of X 60784729 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey Peter 5 3.83 2023 Biography of X
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Peter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves:
review:
4.5, rounded up. A musing on love, art and loss, set in a parallel world amidst a mash up of pop art, music and literature. Lacey's writing is amazingly good- she cuts around between side stories deftly bringing in new characters, dropping others as her narrator attempts to find the truth about what her life with the artist known as X meant. She is furious that an unauthorized biography failed to capture her love's life accurately, and while claiming she is embarking on the real biography is really exploring her grief. A handmaid's tale-like alternative present complements the above story, but could have been better developed- though then the novel might have been too long. The opening third was the stongest part of the book, the middle third a little soft (hence the 4.5) and the ending solid. Overall an exceptional read.
]]> Antigonick 13305951
With text blocks hand-inked on the page by Anne Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie, Antigonick features translucent vellum pages with stunning drawings by Bianca Stone that overlay the text.

Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados.]]> 180 Anne Carson 0811219577 Peter 0 to-read 4.31 2012 Antigonick
author: Anne Carson
name: Peter
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Apple in the Dark 838038 361 Clarice Lispector 0292703929 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.98 1961 The Apple in the Dark
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Peter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> The Chandelier 35783467 Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier with The Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. “It stands out,� her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, “in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book.� Of glacial intensity, consisting almost entirely of interior monologues—interrupted by odd and jarring fragments of dialogue and action—the novel moves in slow waves that crest in moments of revelation. As Virginia seeks freedom via creation, the drama of her isolated life is almost entirely internal: from childhood, she sculpts clay figurines with “the best clay one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. She got a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle ...� While on one level simply the story of a woman’s life, The Chandelier’s real drama lies in Lispector’s attempt “to find the nucleus made of a single instant ... the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing.”�The Chandelier pushes Lispector’s lifelong quest for that nucleus into deeper territories than any of her other amazing works.]]> 304 Clarice Lispector 0811226700 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.94 1946 The Chandelier
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Peter
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1946
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Água Viva 13082435 88 Clarice Lispector 0811219909 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.33 1973 Água Viva
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Peter
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Nox 7428663 192 Anne Carson 0811218708 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.37 2010 Nox
author: Anne Carson
name: Peter
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> The Books in My Life 9262 Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking––but not Henry Miller. In this unique work, he gives an utterly candid and self-revealing account of the reading he did during his formative years. In  The Books in My Life  he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind. Some of Miller's favorite writers are the giants whom most of us revere––authors such as Dostoievsky, Boccaccio, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Lao-Tse. To them he brings fresh and penetrating insights. But many are lesser-known figures: Krishnamurti, the prophet-sage; the French contemporaries Blaise Cendrars and Jean Giono; Richard Jeffries, who wrote  The Story of My Heart ; the Welshman John Cowper Powys; and scores of others.  The Books in My Life contains some fine autobiographical chapters, too. Miller describes his boyhood in Brooklyn, when he devoured the historical stories of G. A. Henty and the romances of Rider Haggard. He tells of the men and women whom he regards as "living books": Lou Jacobs, W. E. B. DuBois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and others. He offers his reminiscences of the New York Theatre in the early 1900's––including plays such as  Alias Jimmy Valentine Ի Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model . And finally, in Miller's best vein of humor, he provides a satiric chapter on bathroom reading. In an appendix, Miller lists the hundred books that have influenced him most.

]]> 320 Henry Miller 0811201082 Peter 0 keeping-in-mind 3.95 1952 The Books in My Life
author: Henry Miller
name: Peter
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: keeping-in-mind
review:

]]> The Flowers of Evil 17839130 The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67). Banned and slighted in his lifetime, the book that contains all of Baudelaire's verses has opened up vistas to the imagination and quickened sensibilities of poets everywhere. Yet it is questionable whether a single translator can give adequate voice to Baudelaire's full poetic range. In compiling their classic, bilingual edition of The Flowers of Evil, the late Marthiel and Jackson Mathews chose from the work of forty-one translators to create a collection that is "a commentary on the present state of the art of translation." The Mathews' volume is a poets' homage to Baudelaire as well. Among the contributors are: Robert Fitzgerald, Anthony Hect, Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, Richard Wilbur, Yvor Winters.]]> 448 Charles Baudelaire Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.43 1857 The Flowers of Evil
author: Charles Baudelaire
name: Peter
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1857
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New Directions Paperbook)]]> 253 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is the result of that odyssey.]]> 292 Henry Miller 0811201066 Peter 3 3.85 1945 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New Directions Paperbook)
author: Henry Miller
name: Peter
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1945
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:

]]> The White Book 40338442
In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.]]> 157 Han Kang 0525573062 Peter 4
I did in general enjoy it as a reading experience, but didn’t love it. The Vegetarian is vastly, vastly better, despite the GR scores for the two.]]> 3.85 2016 The White Book
author: Han Kang
name: Peter
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves:
review:
3.5, rounded up. I am oscillating a little on how this work impacted me. As others note it is not a traditional novel, it is a set of short (typically a paragraph) musings centered around a set of white objects and how they make the writer feel. The answer to how they make the writer feel is depressed, as most are quite neurotic dwellings on death, hardship and misery. Snow is the most common white element focused. Much of the writing is as you would expect quite beautiful- especially those on the writers deceased mother’s spirit. Others sounded a bit more like someone trying to write something that sounded beautiful, though this may well be due to the translation, and I cannot image how difficult it must be to render feelings from words when translating Korean to English.

I did in general enjoy it as a reading experience, but didn’t love it. The Vegetarian is vastly, vastly better, despite the GR scores for the two.
]]> <![CDATA[The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses]]> 595038 Ulysses. Harry Blamires helps readers to negotiate their way through this formidable, remarkable novel and gain an understanding of it which, without help, it might have take several readings to achieve. The New Bloomsday Book is a crystal clear, page-by-page, line-by-line running commentary on the plot of Ulysses which illuminates symbolic themes and structures along the way. It is a highly accessible, indispensible guide for anyone reading Joyce's masterpiece for the first time.]]> 253 Harry Blamires 0415138582 Peter 4 3.98 1988 The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses
author: Harry Blamires
name: Peter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves:
review:
fine as a guide - but I do not understand why people are obsessed with these details- they simply bore me. Just because a writer is making allusions to many things does not make them interesting, in fact, for me, the opposite.
]]> A Sport and a Pastime 2480817         It brings a kind of splendor to the life that refuses to bow to convention or mores, and, like Cavafy's poems, evokes the illicit in a way that endows it with an astonishing beauty. Brilliantly written and overwhelming in its effect, it remains a triumph on every level.]]> 180 James Salter 0679601562 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.55 1967 A Sport and a Pastime
author: James Salter
name: Peter
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Group Portrait With Lady (English and German Edition)]]> 1416334 415 Heinrich Böll 0070064237 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.95 1971 Group Portrait With Lady (English and German Edition)
author: Heinrich Böll
name: Peter
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Peter 0 to-read 3.89 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Peter
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Death Valley 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 Peter 0 to-read 3.46 2023 Death Valley
author: Melissa Broder
name: Peter
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Waves 46114 The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.]]> 297 Virginia Woolf 0156949601 Peter 5 4.17 1931 The Waves
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Peter
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:
wow, amazing (though it did go on a bit too long in the end...). a prose poem on life, aging and death, packed with extraordinary verses and passages- a wonderful reading adventure and example of the power of language. I read an e-book on my phone, which sadly limited the experience of the language, but I will be looking for a fine press/nice old version to reread in a couple of years.
]]> <![CDATA[Kristin Lavransdatter: The Bridal Wreath/The Mistress of Husaby/The Cross]]> 13419138 1066 Sigrid Undset Peter 0 own-tbr, to-read 4.30 1920 Kristin Lavransdatter: The Bridal Wreath/The Mistress of Husaby/The Cross
author: Sigrid Undset
name: Peter
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1920
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: own-tbr, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Bridge on the Drina (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)]]> 56637954 In this masterpiece of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Yugoslavian author, a stone bridge in a small Bosnian town bears silent witness to three centuries of conflict.

The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War. The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates the lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches, spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds. The bridge's builder is a Serbian who was kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans and converted to Islam; he returns in old age as the empire's Grand Vizier, determined to build a bridge at the spot where he last saw his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest point. Later the beautiful Fata leaps from its parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and later still an inveterate gambler named Milan risks all in one final game on it. With humor and compassion, Ivo Andric chronicles the ordinary Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries.]]> 456 Ivo Andrić 0593320220 Peter 4 4.21 1945 The Bridge on the Drina (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
author: Ivo Andrić
name: Peter
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1945
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars. A story spanning 400 years, from the Ottoman empire collecting its crop of child slaves to World War 1. One such slave thrives in Turkey and rises to an exalted position and uses his power to build a bridge in his home region, a bridge that dominates this tale both literally and metaphorically. A string of characters are brought to life across time to illustrate features of their eras, landowners, merchants, inn keepers, peasants, soldiers, students... As the centuries flow by like water under the bridge life in the sleepy town is as steady and changeless as the bridge itself, until the later half of the 19th Century when the Austrio-Hungarian annexation of the region. Muslims no longer rule- though they still own most of the wealth - and now all faiths share in the towns future. Life is transformed as radical modernization leads to things like numbers on houses. It also leads to movement as opportunities throughout the empire lure away the ambitious and the young, who then bring their knowledge back to change their home town. The bridge watches it all benignly, serving all, hosting all. I liked the novel very much, but was a little shy of loving it, probably due to the structure of one personal tale following another. This is fine, just not a favourite of mine. The characters are for the most part well done, but often brief. I am interested in reading the first book of the trilogy (I believe this is the second), which I'll wait a couple of years before starting.
]]> <![CDATA[After the Divorce (European Classics)]]> 130976
Deleda's tragic story of poverty, passion, and guilt portrays the primitive and remote world of the church, pre-Christian superstitions, and laws dictated from the mainland, in her native Sardinia, where society hangs in a delicate balance. Once this order is disrupted, none of these characters can escape the spiral of destruction dictated by fate, God, and society.]]> 174 Grazia Deledda 0810112485 Peter 3 3.00 1902 After the Divorce (European Classics)
author: Grazia Deledda
name: Peter
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1902
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves:
review:
3.5 A tale in a tiny village in the wilds of Sardinia, it captures the extreme poverty and harshness of life there quite well. The translation seems very uneven which might be why it did not read particularly well, and parts just don't seem realistic. Despite the odd language you get a feel for the characters and the times. I'm not sure if I'll read more by Deledda, but I expect some of her other work must be better than this for her to be awarded the Nobel.
]]> History Of Zadig Or Destiny 13626312 172 Voltaire Peter 4 4.50 1747 History Of Zadig Or Destiny
author: Voltaire
name: Peter
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1747
rating: 4
read at: 1995/01/29
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> The Storyteller 53931 ]]> 245 Mario Vargas Llosa 0312420285 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.74 1987 The Storyteller
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: Peter
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Middlesex 2187 Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.]]> 529 Jeffrey Eugenides 0312422156 Peter 0 to-read 4.03 2002 Middlesex
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Peter
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Human Acts 30091914 A riveting, poetic, and fearless portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice by the acclaimed author of The Vegetarian.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, both suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother, their collective heartbreak and acts of hope tell the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 218 Han Kang 1101906723 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.26 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: Peter
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> The Vegetarian 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]> 188 Han Kang 0553448188 Peter 5 �..unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.�
Amazing immersion in a foreign culture and different types of off kilter minds, quite over-whelming, and perfect.]]> 3.61 2007 The Vegetarian
author: Han Kang
name: Peter
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves:
review:
So many levels of despair.� Mishima or Dasai like perfect prose, and crazy as hell people. In this case, pretty much everyone. If you think a character is sane- just wait a bit.
�..unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.�
Amazing immersion in a foreign culture and different types of off kilter minds, quite over-whelming, and perfect.
]]> The Magic Mountain 38534684 Mountain 697 Thomas Mann 3100481097 Peter 5 own-tbr 4.60 1924 The Magic Mountain
author: Thomas Mann
name: Peter
average rating: 4.60
book published: 1924
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: own-tbr
review:
4.5, a superb story told with gentle wit and keen insight, as we follow our solid, kind, and often silly hero in his experiences on the magic mountain. Time is a recurring theme, from the prolog to the conclusion- but then so again are informal pronouns... The framework of the story itself, and whether Hans is ever actually even ill is not particularly important, the central element is how Hans deals with life at the sanatorium and the myriad of relationships that form and break as people come and go, for one reason or another. He is a bit of a lost soul, and taken under the wing of larger personalities that he seems incapable or resisting, even odious ones. Well, he can resist ugly and crude personalities which he abhors, but then has an inability to turn away from others that are equally distasteful - just masked by intellect, I speak of course of Naphta. Not all are nasty of course, some are wonderful, like, Settembrini, who adopts Hans as his pupil. I did find some of the concluding chapters a bit of a drag- after such a long work the sections on seances (I simply do not see any point) and the cabin fever were quite frustrating, though the latter was important for the Naphta conclusion. A tale of manners and the times (early 1900's) in the microcosm of a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps.
]]> Leopard (Everyman's Library) 78706 300 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1857150236 Peter 5 own-tbr ]]> 4.13 1958 Leopard (Everyman's Library)
author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
name: Peter
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: own-tbr
review:
Extraordinary! As usual I read the novel, then the introduction, and as usual, was very glad that I did so. The tale of the Leopard is set in the 1800s, in the home of an amazing character, the Prince, as he guides his family through the turmoils of the times and his families failure to thrive. He is as charming as Amor Towles Count, but told with an authenticity far beyond. The grand yet decrepit palace comes to life, as, it turns out, because the author is in fact the last prince of who himself grew up in the very same palace. The tale is a meld of his childhood memories, his life itself, tales of his forebears, and his closest friend, an astronomer, mathematician and poet- no wonder the central character has some depth! Separate chapters cover events in punctate time windows, each of which impacts the family strongly, or in the case of the last couple, shows us how events unfolded. There is no attempt to show what events lead to situations, Lampedusa even says at one point such details would be boring to relate, and it of course works wonderfully just how it is. But I was left wondering� where did the prince get his sophistication and as he would put it, culture? What of his past and family and growing up? We get to know him a little from the couple of snapshots, and I was left wanting more. Very highly recommended.

]]> <![CDATA[The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)]]> 884702
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."]]> 361 Philip Roth 0224060902 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.30 2000 The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
author: Philip Roth
name: Peter
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out]]> 1320279 540 Mo Yan 1559708530 Peter 5 4.04 2006 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
author: Mo Yan
name: Peter
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:
Amazing. It is quite a few years since I read this and details are a little dim, but I loved this story. We follow our narrator as he is sequentially reincarnated through a series of creatures that witness the transformation of Chinese life under the communist government, from early village life to quite recent mass movement into massive scale modern housing, and the transformations of society that accompanied these. A funny, warm, rich tale told with wisdom and insight. I also enjoyed his Red Sorghum, but think Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out was even better.
]]> <![CDATA[Chess (Little Clothbound Classics)]]> 62978912 Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith

Stefan Zweig's slim novella is one of the most powerful, subtle stories of the twentieth century]]> 128 Stefan Zweig 0241630827 Peter 4 4.30 1942 Chess (Little Clothbound Classics)
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Peter
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1942
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:
i’m not entirely certain of what this very good short story was about. partly it is the labyrinth of the human mind, but i suspect Zweig was writing about more than this. his world champion was also meant to represent something- but what? unimaginative readers? while he was the opponent with the infinite maelstrom of complex battling ideas�?
]]> <![CDATA[The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante Peter 4 own-tbr 4.47 2012 The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Peter
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: own-tbr
review:
The first half was a 3, the same old dynamic between Elena and Lila, though the brutal portrayal of the dehumanizing experience of a 16 year old bride was very well done- heartbreaking. Men owning, brutalizing and using women was a major theme, just as violence was in the first novel. The second half, beginning with the time in Ischia, picked up and was a solid 4. While I don't really feel the magic others do in these novels the solid ending means I will read the third, after a break.
]]> Cosima 130974 156 Grazia Deledda 0934977062 Peter 0 to-read 3.56 1936 Cosima
author: Grazia Deledda
name: Peter
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Martin Eden 929782 Martin Eden is the most vital and original character Jack London ever created. Set in San Francisco, this is the story of Martin Eden, an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame. London, dissatisfied with the rewards of his own success, intended Martin Eden as an attack on individualism and a criticism of ambition; however, much of its status as a classic has been conferred by admirers of its ambitious protagonist.

Andrew Sinclair's wide-ranging introduction discusses the conflict between London's support of socialism and his powerful self-will. Sinclair also explores the parallels and divergences between the life of Martin Eden and that of his creator, focusing on London's mental depressions and how they affected his depiction of Eden.]]> 480 Jack London Peter 0 to-read 4.47 1909 Martin Eden
author: Jack London
name: Peter
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1909
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 431 The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels � from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel

The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.� Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.]]> 308 Paul Auster 0143039830 Peter 3 3.93 1987 The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Paul Auster
name: Peter
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves:
review:
3.5 The odd twilight zone-like stories of the first and second books in the trilogy were quite enjoyable, but I really didn't like the third at all. Each is a corridor of mirrors and of course not what you see in the first mirror.
]]> The Gadfly 122986633 0 Ethel Lilian Voynich Peter 0 to-read 0.0 1897 The Gadfly
author: Ethel Lilian Voynich
name: Peter
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1897
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Lost Father 12892777 277 Marina Warner Peter 0 own-tbr, to-read 2.00 1988 The Lost Father
author: Marina Warner
name: Peter
average rating: 2.00
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: own-tbr, to-read
review:

]]> The Conservationist 2850660 252 Nadine Gordimer 0224038311 Peter 4 own-tbr 3.60 1974 The Conservationist
author: Nadine Gordimer
name: Peter
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: own-tbr
review:
Good, but short of great. The writing is as expected excellent and captures the feel of the times in South Africa very well. We follow along as our central character, Mehring, loves his getaway farm more and more and his friends and lovers less and less, all watched by the impoverished non-whites that were there before him, and will be after. The end I found a little soft. Mehring is an odd central character, not an active racist but firmly embedded in the apartheid culture, I'm not sure what Gordimer wanted us to feel about him at all, and in fact maybe his purpose was to reflect the times. The title seems to refer not to Mehring's conservation of nature on his farm, which at most he dabbles in, but more in that his acceptance of apartheid and apathy/mockery towards any effort to change it end up conserving and promulgating it.
]]> Solenoid 60582780
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history� the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript―Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.]]> 639 Mircea Cărtărescu 1646052021 Peter 5
bones in an adolescent girls body changing colors- even in black and white xrays

giant statues that come to life and crush people under their feet

an abandoned factory full of miracles

A TB sanatorium for children operated by robots

and many many more, woven through the fabric of a teachers life ("the saddest of all lives...") in communist Bucharest, subatomic physics, hypercubes, and a love story. Wow!]]> 4.31 2015 Solenoid
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: Peter
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves:
review:
wow, what a trip. I'll have to mull on this marvel for a while to distill what I brought away. An extraordinary wild ride through the narrator's unique universe as he shares with us his 'anomalies' and his endless list of fears and paranoias, including; lice, mites and bedbugs, dentists, transparent marine invertebrates, human anatomy (especially neural and auditory), whales, stars, melancholy, foul fermenting substances, hospitals, factories, the fourth dimension, embryos, pain, translucent materials and perhaps most of all, the monstrous injustice of being sentient and understanding that consciousness was pointless in an infinite universe... Just beautifully written and translated, the language dances like the narrator's hands as the magical tale winds through the poverty and despair of 'the saddest city on earth', Bucharest. Are the magical tales dreams, hallucinations, reality?

bones in an adolescent girls body changing colors- even in black and white xrays

giant statues that come to life and crush people under their feet

an abandoned factory full of miracles

A TB sanatorium for children operated by robots

and many many more, woven through the fabric of a teachers life ("the saddest of all lives...") in communist Bucharest, subatomic physics, hypercubes, and a love story. Wow!
]]> 100 Poems 41940258 Selected poems from a Nobel laureate

Seamus Heaney had the idea to form a personal selection of poems from across the entire arc of his writing life, small yet comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction for all comers. He never managed to do this himself, and no other edition exists that has such a broad range, drawing from the first to the last of his prizewinning collections. But now, finally, the project has been returned to, resulting in an intimate gathering of poems chosen and introduced by the Heaney family. In 100 Poems, readers will enjoy the most loved and celebrated poems, and will discover new favorites. It is a singular and welcoming anthology, reaching far and wide, for now and for years to come.]]> 192 Seamus Heaney 0374100292 Peter 5 4.26 100 Poems
author: Seamus Heaney
name: Peter
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
Not as good of a collection as those in The Spirit Level, or Poems and a Memoir, but as always with Heaney, magical forms melded from language
]]> <![CDATA[City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)]]> 432 City of Glass inaugurates an intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye... It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Written with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense.

Ghosts and The Locked Room are the next two brilliant installments in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.

]]> 203 Paul Auster 0140097317 Peter 4 3.79 1985 City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)
author: Paul Auster
name: Peter
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
an odd little book: 3.5 - I'm curious about the sequels/other parts of the trilogy
]]> 84, Charing Cross Road 35113087 230 Helene Hanff Peter 4 4.00 1970 84, Charing Cross Road
author: Helene Hanff
name: Peter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
3.5 - while it certainly had some charm I found elements slightly off-putting, mostly on the side of Ms. Hanff, so I didn't embrace the chain of letters to the extent that many do. As I think most book lovers feel, of course I'd like to meet my match and share my passion with a like-minded soul, but that isn't all of what happens here. The selection of letters that clearly skip large blocks of time seems a little self-aggrandizing, though of course if a non-fictional selection of letters is what one had to work with, the gaps may be uninteresting and sensibly removed. I wasn't moved to read the sequel. What I enjoyed most were Frank's letters that captured the time and tone of post WW2 London wonderfully.
]]> After Nature 835544 After Nature, W. G. Sebald’s first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind’s place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, “an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance.� The first figure is the great German Re-naissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages.
After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.

Author Biography: W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previously translated books�The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz—have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.

]]> 128 W.G. Sebald 0375504850 Peter 0 currently-reading, own-tbr 3.88 1988 After Nature
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Peter
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: currently-reading, own-tbr
review:

]]> Transit 29939363 The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015.

In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life.

Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed Outline, and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this precise, short, and yet epic cycle of novels, Cusk manages to describe the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life, through a narrative near-silence that draws language toward it. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one's life and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.]]> 260 Rachel Cusk 0374278628 Peter 4 3.98 2016 Transit
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Peter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/12
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves:
review:
Exceptional. The nameless narrator, "The writer", shares vignettes from her conversations- most from over the course of a couple of days. These conversations are all insightful and deep in a striking manner, and if they are not going along this path the writer prompts them with unexpected questions that bend them in this direction. Dialogs with her hairdresser, the nasty trolls in the council flat under her own, an ex-lover bumped into on the street, a friend in the fashion industry, a cousin... all in all a heterogeneous conglomerate cemented by her laser sharp observations and questioning. With her guidance all plumb the depths of the human soul - which of course seems a little unrealistic, as I also found in Outline. Not so unrealistic as to not really enjoy each and every little story, with stunning prose and an outlook on life, relationships and what is important that is quite unique.
]]> Faust 15834666 Faust reworks the late medieval myth of a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract with Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephistopheles and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire, and self-delusion, Faust heads inexorably toward an infernal destruction.]]> Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Peter 2 3.62 1808 Faust
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Peter
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1808
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/09
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves:
review:
didn't work for me I'm afraid as a reading experience, though interesting and a very nicely produced volume
]]> Juggling 3731062 320 Barbara Trapido 0140250867 Peter 3 3.94 1994 Juggling
author: Barbara Trapido
name: Peter
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
review:
Good dancing dialog and an excellent central character- Christina. A web of characters with intersecting lives coalesces into neat little clusters. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style the last third fell flat- the threads winding together was just too neat, and a bit creepy. There was also a silly floating thing that must be meant to mean something, but as i don’t know what it is I found it simply annoying. 3.5, nowhere near "Brother of the more famous Jack".
]]> Foster 8143909
Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan's great accomplishment and talent.]]> 89 Claire Keegan 0571255655 Peter 4 a sweet, kind, short story 4.32 2010 Foster
author: Claire Keegan
name: Peter
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
review:
a sweet, kind, short story
]]> The Colossus and Other Poems 59929449 89 Sylvia Plath Peter 5 own-tbr 4.00 1960 The Colossus and Other Poems
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Peter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: own-tbr
review:
amazing- I especially liked the maritime themed poems
]]> <![CDATA[Bee-Stung Lips: Barbara Hanrahan, Works on Paper 1960-1991]]> 59650000
Bee-stung Lips reproduces more than 100 of Hanrahan's works on paper, while new essays by Nic Brown, Jacqueline Millner and Elspeth Pitt delve into the artist's themes, motivations and motifs, affirming the singularity of Hanrahan's vision and its relevance to our times thirty years after the artist's death in her prime.]]> 128 Nic Brown 1743058616 Peter 5 4.75 Bee-Stung Lips: Barbara Hanrahan, Works on Paper 1960-1991
author: Nic Brown
name: Peter
average rating: 4.75
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
review:
Hanrahan's work is simply stunning, each work a novel unto itself, with cutting insights and feelings so powerful they grab you from the image. This book is from a survey exhibition of her works, and in addition to reproductions of her prints and etchings, has three excellent essays that provide detail and insight into selected elements of the works.
]]> Creation Lake 208160287
Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir� is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.]]> 408 Rachel Kushner 1787331741 Peter 4 Sadie's target is an ecoactivist group in rural France. One of the groups mentors is a local amateur anthropologist, Bruno, who occupies a significant chunk of the book. At first I found these diversions a bit annoying, especially as in his verbose emails he clearly does not think like a real scientist, though maybe that is in fact a real reflection of the field. As the story move on Sadie manipulates those around her without feeling anything more for them than they were ants in her ant farm, but slowly Bruno's musings on what things are important about life slowly work into her consciousness, and ultimately change her story.
I enjoyed the book. The concept of legions of such operatives working freelance around the world to bump and prod any opposition to governments/corporations will is terribly bleak, especially as it is so plausible. As a spy novel I didn't find it on the same level as really good ones (The Innocent, Transcription...), but it is more about Sadie herself, who isn't real - even as a character, fiction within fiction, and how she is touched by an old philosophical recluse. The fact that what the recluse actually says isn't that interesting is the weakest part of the novel in my opinion.]]> 3.45 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Peter
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
review:
Some time ago I listened to a story on "This American Life" about the FBI setting up undercover operations that essentially entrapped individuals that were really nothing more than angry side-standers. Putting options in front of them, like stinger missiles, and guiding them into actions that led to arrest on terrorism charges. In each story the commonality was that nothing would have happened if the FBI had not driven the entire process, all in the name of their "war on terror". This novel is built around exactly such a story, and it is centred on the undercover operative guiding the process. It is told by our operative in the first person, and we follow her actions and thought, which frequently include " ..., I didn't say" as she provokes then lets events roll downhill. On occassion after a few drinks she realises she in fact did allow her thoughts to slip out, but in general she is strictly controlled and analytical. Sadie is strongly opinionated, especially regarding all elements of her personality and why they are the best, and on her fake (but expensive fake) breasts- a metaphor for her entire synthetic character?
Sadie's target is an ecoactivist group in rural France. One of the groups mentors is a local amateur anthropologist, Bruno, who occupies a significant chunk of the book. At first I found these diversions a bit annoying, especially as in his verbose emails he clearly does not think like a real scientist, though maybe that is in fact a real reflection of the field. As the story move on Sadie manipulates those around her without feeling anything more for them than they were ants in her ant farm, but slowly Bruno's musings on what things are important about life slowly work into her consciousness, and ultimately change her story.
I enjoyed the book. The concept of legions of such operatives working freelance around the world to bump and prod any opposition to governments/corporations will is terribly bleak, especially as it is so plausible. As a spy novel I didn't find it on the same level as really good ones (The Innocent, Transcription...), but it is more about Sadie herself, who isn't real - even as a character, fiction within fiction, and how she is touched by an old philosophical recluse. The fact that what the recluse actually says isn't that interesting is the weakest part of the novel in my opinion.
]]> Breasts and Eggs 50736031
Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.

It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Her silence proves a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and frustrations.

On another hot summer’s day ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless.]]> 430 Mieko Kawakami 1609455878 Peter 0 to-read 3.87 2019 Breasts and Eggs
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Peter
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blinding 17288801 464 Mircea Cărtărescu 1935744844 Peter 0 to-read 4.26 1996 Blinding
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: Peter
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Garden of Seven Twilights 61629865 885 Miquel de Palol i Muntanyola 1628974516 Peter 0 keeping-in-mind 4.12 1989 The Garden of Seven Twilights
author: Miquel de Palol i Muntanyola
name: Peter
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: keeping-in-mind
review:

]]> Turtle Diary 40833 182 Russell Hoban 0747548315 Peter 0 keeping-in-mind 3.97 1975 Turtle Diary
author: Russell Hoban
name: Peter
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: keeping-in-mind
review:

]]> A Tale for the Time Being 15811545
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. 

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.]]> 432 Ruth Ozeki 0670026638 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.06 2013 A Tale for the Time Being
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Peter
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Mothering Sunday 28511477
It is Mothering Sunday.

How will Jane Fairchild, orphan and housemaid, occupy her time when she has no mother to visit? How, shaped by the events of this never to be forgotten day, will her future unfold?

Beginning with an intimate assignation and opening to embrace decades, Mothering Sunday has at its heart both the story of a life and the life that stories can magically contain. Constantly surprising, joyously sensual and deeply moving, it is Graham Swift at his thrilling best.]]> 132 Graham Swift 1471155234 Peter 4 own-tbr 3.77 2016 Mothering Sunday
author: Graham Swift
name: Peter
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: own-tbr
review:
A bright brave soul who gets a taste of freedom, consumes it with relish, and later runs with it. This short novel isn't on the scale of Waterland in size, depth, or structure, which of course in its short form would be extremely difficult–but it is very, very good. In reminded me a little of Woolf both in writing style and in the way we are inside our narrator's mind as her thoughts drift through her, what turns out to be, intense day. Jane is clearly bright, brave and adventurous and willing to push the envelope of her strictly structured maid's world in its rigid environment. Her wealthy lover, after some farewell for ever love making, leaves her in his family home, and she wanders around naked, feeling and absorbing the house and the experience, her universe expanding on her special Sunday off. I liked the sisterhood aspect of the maids world that was portrayed. A fine, very well told tale.
]]> <![CDATA[Brother of the More Famous Jack]]> 20518796 Brother of the More Famous Jack again and again. Dog-eared copies of this long out-of-print novel are highly prized and shared enthusiastically in literary circles - its return to print is cause for celebration.

Stylish, suburban Katherine is eighteen when she is propelled into the heart of Professor Jacob Goldman's rambling home and his large eccentric family. As his enchanting yet sharp-tongued wife, Jane, gives birth to her sixth child, Katherine meets beautiful, sulky Roger and his volatile younger brother, Jonathan. Inevitable heartbreak sends her fleeing to Rome, but ten years later, older and wiser, she returns to find the Goldmans again.]]> 239 Barbara Trapido 1620407221 Peter 4 3.84 1982 Brother of the More Famous Jack
author: Barbara Trapido
name: Peter
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/02
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
just wonderful! it seemed to me that katherine was really in love with Jacob, but had to take the closest she could get. her search for love is heartbreakingly sad and beautifully told with artful and witty language.
]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Peter 0 to-read 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Peter
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Night Watchman 43721059
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation� bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination� that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run�?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.]]> 464 Louise Erdrich 0062671200 Peter 0 to-read 4.05 2020 The Night Watchman
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Peter
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mrs. Dalloway 14942 194 Virginia Woolf 0151009988 Peter 4 3.80 1925 Mrs. Dalloway
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Peter
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1925
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
review:
An interesting, beautifully written story that drifts from one person’s thoughts to another’s over the course of a single summers day in London between the wars. As old friends come together they evaluate their shared pasts and their futures as they confront lost youth and looming old age and death.
]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Works Of Ernest Hemingway: Nine-Book Bundle]]> 22062664 The Collected Works of Ernest Hemingway brings together novels of the acclaimed American author. From early promise to literary maturity, the novels of Ernest Hemingway are the work of a skilled storyteller that continue to resonate with modern readers. This special ebook edition The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea, Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden.

HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.]]> 2377 Ernest Hemingway 1443437077 Peter 3
Merged review:

The novels are transcendent - the electronic book terrible. It is badly formatted, hard to navigate and full of typos. It destroys the rare pleasure of reading such incredible prose, and I'll be sticking to print for rereads from now on]]> 4.08 2014 The Collected Works Of Ernest Hemingway: Nine-Book Bundle
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Peter
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:
The novels are transcendent - the electronic book terrible. It is badly formatted, hard to navigate and full of typos. It destroys the rare pleasure of reading such incredible prose, and I'll be sticking to print for rereads from now on

Merged review:

The novels are transcendent - the electronic book terrible. It is badly formatted, hard to navigate and full of typos. It destroys the rare pleasure of reading such incredible prose, and I'll be sticking to print for rereads from now on
]]> Collected Poems 29858223 583 Carol Ann Duffy 1447231430 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.15 2015 Collected Poems
author: Carol Ann Duffy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The multiple effects of rainshadow]]> 2892814
The effects of the rampage ripple out from the island to link the fates of those who witnessed it, across the north and down through the decades. It is a time when silence in the face of tyranny is at its loudest. When allegiance to English niceties is confounded by the landscape and by the weather. And change is a slow wind that brings little real difference.]]> 296 Thea Astley 0670872164 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.85 1996 The multiple effects of rainshadow
author: Thea Astley
name: Peter
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> The Biographer's Tale 435298 272 A.S. Byatt 0701169451 Peter 2 keeping-in-mind 3.28 2000 The Biographer's Tale
author: A.S. Byatt
name: Peter
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/13
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: keeping-in-mind
review:
abandoned. after a strong start it drifted into a boring maze. I am a big admirer of her writing in general- but not this one. It reminded me a bit of Peter Carey’s bad novels. Once again i’m a big fan of most of his books that rate amongst my all time favorites, but on occasion he used a similar style as this work, and in my opinion it doesn’t work for either of them
]]> All Souls' Day 326020 352 Cees Nooteboom 0330392603 Peter 0 to-read 3.66 1998 All Souls' Day
author: Cees Nooteboom
name: Peter
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rituals 20989322 224 Cees Nooteboom 1782067175 Peter 5 3.72 1980 Rituals
author: Cees Nooteboom
name: Peter
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:
Exceptional, strong 4.5. We follow our central character, Inni, through his wanderings as he seeks his unique solution to life. Inni is an odd individual (as all Wintrops are!) who sees and feels very intensely, but differently to others, all that happens around him. This is by turns entertaining, sad and fascinating, as Inni has an inheritance drop in his lap that allows him to wander through life in relative freedom in Amsterdam post WW2. This doesn't in any way capture the quality of this wonderful novel, but neither does the introduction of this edition by A.S. Byatt, one simply has to read it to get the experience.
]]> 2666 3115359 2666 has been greeted as his greatest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness,beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters include academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student caring for her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the desert sprawl of Santa Teresa--a fictional Juárez--on the US-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. Audacious, impassioned and profoundly inspired, 2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork.

]]> 898 Roberto Bolaño 0374100144 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.12 2004 2666
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Peter
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life]]> 53487237 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?� He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.]]> 403 George Saunders 1984856049 Peter 0 to-read 4.55 2021 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
author: George Saunders
name: Peter
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Winter in the Blood 54732987
During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter in the Blood , is one of his most enduring works. The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montana's vast emptiness. Winter in the Blood is an evocative and unforgettable work of literature that will continue to move and inspire anyone who encounters it.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 160 James Welch 0143136194 Peter 5 3.71 1974 Winter in the Blood
author: James Welch
name: Peter
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
Wow, a masterpiece. This was one of the 'perfect short novels' recommended by Louise Erdrich in 'The Sentence', and I completely concur. Louise also wrote the forward to this edition and her thoughts were very aligned with my own, as I read her forward immediately after completing the novel (my usual practice). As we follow our narrators bumping through life we see and feel what he does in an extraordinary way. The language is simply beautiful, and apparently the story started as a poem that became a novel, and at times it remains the poem still - just wonderful.
]]> <![CDATA[Original Fire : Selected and New Poems]]> 130586973 176 Louise Erdrich Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 2.00 2003 Original Fire : Selected and New Poems
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Peter
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Quartet in Autumn 227002 186 Barbara Pym 0330326481 Peter 3 3.90 1978 Quartet in Autumn
author: Barbara Pym
name: Peter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1978
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/19
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves:
review:
I broke my rule of waiting a ‘decent� time (a very Pymish term!) before reading the same author again, in this case I read Barbara Pym’s exceptional “Excellent Women� not long before Quartet. This may have been a factor, but also the bleakness of the lives that form the core of this novel, that made this much less enjoyable. There is scant nobility in this bleakness, and the characters, if anything, embrace it. The tale is in 70’s London, in the tiny universe of an office staffed by two men and two women. They are an odd bunch, boring empty people incapable of the tiniest impact on other people or the world. Or on even their office in fact- once they have all retired it will be shut down and nobody, including the Quartet, seems to know its purpose- it just is. They will all retire and continue to do nothing of interest beyond perhaps eating some tinned food, or getting crazy and going to a library, only to be disappointed by it except for perhaps taking offence at the librarian's hairstyle. The only character that elicited any sympathy was Lettie, but Lettie is far from an excellent woman, too timid and boring; she was a bright spark only in contrast to the other three. The writing is of course warm and witty despite the cast of characters, and the evocation of 70’s Britain and post-colonial implosion very well done- but it’s not great fun.
]]> A Far Cry from Kensington 38329097 A Far Cry from Kensington is a mischievous and stylish tale of the cost of telling the truth.]]> 192 Muriel Spark 1846974429 Peter 4 4.10 1988 A Far Cry from Kensington
author: Muriel Spark
name: Peter
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves:
review:
A fun Spark romp, on her second tier. A war-widow's lively life in the London publishing world, where it is so hard to get a job, is tainted by an onerous villain. 3.5 rounded up.
]]> Taller When Prone: Poems 8543255 88 Les Murray 1847771238 Peter 0 own-tbr, to-read 3.50 2010 Taller When Prone: Poems
author: Les Murray
name: Peter
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: own-tbr, to-read
review:

]]> The Dream Songs 150236 This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."

The Dream Songs are eighteen-line poems in three stanzas. Each individual poem is lyric and organized around an emotion provoked by an everyday event. The tone of the poems is less surreal than associational or intoxicated. The principal character of the song cycle is Henry, who is both the narrator of the poems and referred to by the narrator in the poems.

]]> 427 John Berryman 0374530661 Peter 0 own-tbr, to-read 4.19 1969 The Dream Songs
author: John Berryman
name: Peter
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/08
shelves: own-tbr, to-read
review:

]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Peter 0 to-read 3.88 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Peter
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Holy Terrors 80268
At home, Paul shares a private world with his sister Elisabeth, a world from which parents are tacitly excluded. Their room is where the Game is played, the Game being their own bizarre version of life. All that they do outside is effectively controlled by the rules of the Game -- but unfortunately the rules of the Game mean that everybody loses.]]> 192 Jean Cocteau 0811200213 Peter 0 keeping-in-mind 3.88 1929 The Holy Terrors
author: Jean Cocteau
name: Peter
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: keeping-in-mind
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Peter 4 4.14 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Peter
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
review:
A solid 4.5 for this very sweet short story. Sweet because of the goodness, but also some heartbreaking cruelty. A good man who learned what is right as a child in unusual circumstances applies his life lessons to confront wrongs while those around bury their heads in the sand and look the other way. The writing is lyrical and just lovely.
]]> <![CDATA[The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in Görbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.66 2022 The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Peter
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> White Noise 28251250
White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultra­modern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback

Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition]]> 320 Don DeLillo 0143129554 Peter 4 3.88 1985 White Noise
author: Don DeLillo
name: Peter
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves:
review:
Some fine writing and some creative insights in its weird world of creepy, grotesque adults but fine children. I found the supersaturation of Americanness hard to take and reduced the analysis of human fears and stupidity from a universal to a more provincial level.
]]> Harvest 15797182 208 Jim Crace 0385520778 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 3.58 2013 Harvest
author: Jim Crace
name: Peter
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Kairos 163485528
From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.]]> 293 Jenny Erpenbeck 1783786124 Peter 4 All of the writing was excellent, and the translated text flowed beautifully.
So, a mix. I can’t describe it as an enjoyable read as the cruelty of Hans crushing a beautiful life was torture, but the story of life in the GDR and the hope that Katharina would just kill him and start a new life held me through it. I’m not surprised to see many did not finish on this, and low numerical GR score, the cruelty of a petty pathetic man who has some power is very hard to take.]]> 3.36 2021 Kairos
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Peter
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:
This had some extremely tough windows of nothing but misery and cruelty. It is a story of power and victims of power, on a personal and an national level. The personal is an affair between a sweet, lovely and intelligent teen (intelligent intellectually, not emotionally) and an absolute asshole old man ten years older than her father. Why she ever likes him to begin with is unclear, she thinks him handsome (and his string of extramarital affairs supports this) and once she learns about his life and discovers he is an author and radio ‘celebrity� of sorts, she dives into her first great love head first. It isn’t a good choice. From day one he is controlling, at first ground rules because he is married, and although he pretends he and his wife have agreed to give each other some latitude it sounds like this is completely untrue. His poor wife and son� more victims. Also from day 1 he takes his new lover into his marital bed while the wife is away, and he can smell Katharina on his sheets once she has gone. Katharina has to abide by his rules for when and how they can meet and make her love, and life, revolve around his and his boundaries. There follows a mix of amazingly vivid descriptions of life in the GDR blended with the extramarital affair that finds Katharina deeply, madly in love and forming a bond that will be the foundation for the remainder of the novel. She is just so happy when she receives any attention and time from her lover, who she simply worships. As Katharina tries to build a life based on her love the creepy old fucker both depends on her love (and uses this to increase his hold), and abuses it both mentally and physically, starting up with sadism during sex that Katharina meekly submits to, and at times he only stops when her silent tears become too much for even him. It is torture to read. As it gets worse and worse she just can’t leave, even after he brutally dumps her on one occasion - which ends up having terrible consequences for Katharina and a new source of power for Hans that be relishes. He slips in the knife and just twists and twists. Hans� son Ludwig seems the only person that recognises Hans as a monster. Ewwww, how I loathed that character. Mixed in with the prolonged death throes of their relationship and the sadness of a wonderful soul being crushed is the more complex and larger scale implosion of the GDR, the fall of the wall, and reunification is a second story line, in ways paralleling the love story as the Soviet Union abandons the worshiping GDR. The early parts of the novel are a fascinating glimpse into what life was like in the GDR. The story of reunification itself, where a whole nation that essentially worked for the state was out of employment pretty much instantly (a whole nation!!), their money valueless, their hopes for a future more just society, a better form of socialism, all swept away without them having a word to say on the subject. This was really interesting and vividly told.
All of the writing was excellent, and the translated text flowed beautifully.
So, a mix. I can’t describe it as an enjoyable read as the cruelty of Hans crushing a beautiful life was torture, but the story of life in the GDR and the hope that Katharina would just kill him and start a new life held me through it. I’m not surprised to see many did not finish on this, and low numerical GR score, the cruelty of a petty pathetic man who has some power is very hard to take.
]]> Treasure Island!!! 12358020 Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. When had she ever dreamed a scheme? When had she ever done a foolish, overbold act? When had she ever, like Jim Hawkins, broke from her friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, and eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of her getting a hunk of gold?



Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister, and a hostile Amazon parrot that refuses to follow the script, our heroine embarks on a domestic adventure more frightening than anything she'd originally planned.

Treasure Island!!! is the story of a ferocious obsession, told by an original voice-intelligent, perverse, relentlessly self- extricating, and funny.

]]> 172 Sara Levine 1609450612 Peter 4 3.35 2011 Treasure Island!!!
author: Sara Levine
name: Peter
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves:
review:
Our narrator slashes her way through family, friends, pets and relationships with her trusty cutlass. A extraordinarily selfish narrator leaves a trail of wreckage in her wake as she claims to model her previously empty life on a new suite of core values, none of which she actually touches upon, except perhaps boldness and horn blowing. Despite her vast list of failures she is really very funny, and I doubt anyone can read some pages without laughing out loud (would you like to take a seat?) at her perverse but endlessly amusing (from a distance) attack on life. A short very fun read.
]]> Solar Bones 29773751 ringing out over its villages and townlands,
over the fields and hills and bogs in between,

six chimes of three across a minute and a half,�
a summons struck�
on the lip of the void

Once a year, on All Souls� Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.

Funny and strange, McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This is profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day.]]> 223 Mike McCormack 0992817099 Peter 0 keeping-in-mind 3.80 2016 Solar Bones
author: Mike McCormack
name: Peter
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: keeping-in-mind
review:

]]> The Art of Losing 53317463
Naïma knows Algeria only by the artifacts she encounters in her grandparents� tiny apartment in Normandy: the language her grandmother speaks but Naïma can’t understand, the food her grandmother cooks, and the precious things her grandmother carried when they fled. Naïma’s father claims to remember nothing; he has made himself French. Her grandfather died before he could tell her his side of the story. But now Naïma will travel to Algeria to see for herself what was left behind—including their secrets.

The Algerian War for Independence sent Naïma’s grandfather on a journey of his own, from wealthy olive grove owner and respected veteran of the First World War, to refugee spurned as a harki by his fellow Algerians in the transit camps of southern France, to immigrant barely scratching out a living in the north. The long battle against colonial rule broke apart communities, opened deep rifts within families, and saw the whims of those in even temporary power instantly overturn the lives of ordinary people. Where does Naïma’s family fit into this history? How do they fit into France’s future?]]> 448 Alice Zeniter 0374182302 Peter 0 to-read 4.17 2017 The Art of Losing
author: Alice Zeniter
name: Peter
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[They Were Found Wanting / They Were Divided (The Transylvanian Trilogy, #2-3)]]> 16071755 Meanwhile, they fail to notice how the Great Powers - through such events as Austria's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 - are moving ever closer to the conflagration of 1914-1918 that will destroy their world forever. Contrasting a life of privilege and corruption with the lives and problems of an expatriate Romanian peasant minority whom Balint tries to help, this portrait is an unrivalled evocation of a rich and fascinating aristocratic world oblivious of its impending demise.

The celebrated Transylvanian Trilogy by Count Miklos Banffy is a stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian aristocracy just before World War I. Written in the 1930s and first discovered by the English-speaking world after the fall of communism in Hungary, Banffy's novels were translated in the late 1990s to critical acclaim and appear here for the first time in hardcover. Set amid magnificent scenery of wild forests, snowcapped mountains, and ancient castles, the Transylvanian Trilogy combines a Proustian nostalgia for a lost world, insight into a collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama and epic sweep of Tolstoy.]]> 830 Miklós Bánffy 0375712305 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.59 1940 They Were Found Wanting / They Were Divided (The Transylvanian Trilogy, #2-3)
author: Miklós Bánffy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.59
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Ceremony (Penguin Vitae) 58536107 272 Leslie Marmon Silko 0143137190 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.11 1977 Ceremony (Penguin Vitae)
author: Leslie Marmon Silko
name: Peter
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> Cold Enough for Snow 58730649 Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world.

Selected from more than 1,500 entries, Cold Enough for Snow won the Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by Fitzcarraldo Editions, New Directions (US) and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form.]]> 99 Jessica Au 1913097765 Peter 3 3.79 2022 Cold Enough for Snow
author: Jessica Au
name: Peter
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
3.5. An unusual little book, made up of scattered moments in the present and past of our narrator, and at times her sister. Each moment had sharp details, like the scent of the tea and the weight and color of the teapot, but the set of experiences is very scattered. One moment we are at a conference in her sister's past, then on a hike, the next as a job while a university student, and the next on a trip to a boyfriend's old family home. All are deeply personal and together they form a framework that gives a surprisingly complete feel for the way our slightly neurotic narrator experiences the world.
]]> Quicksand 23492644
Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship.

With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world—including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award—Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.]]> 368 Steve Toltz 147679782X Peter 5 3.47 2015 Quicksand
author: Steve Toltz
name: Peter
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2020/12/23
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
Magnificent, hilarious, insightful- what more could you ask for?
]]> <![CDATA[Fair Copy (The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize)]]> 15804709 Fair Copy by Rebecca Hazelton is a meditation on the difficulties of distinguishing the real from the false, the copy from the original. It is in part an exploration of the disparity between our conception of love as either true or false and the messy reality that it can sometimes be both. If “true� love is not to be found, is an approximation a “fair� substitute? These poems repeatedly question the veracity of memory—sometimes toying with the seductiveness of nostalgia while at other times pleading for the real story. Here, the fairytale and the everyday nervously coexist, the bride is an uneasy molecule, and happiness comes in the form of a pill. Composed of acrostics from lines by Emily Dickinson, the collection retains a direct and recurrent tie to Dickinson’s work, even while Hazelton deftly branches off into new sonic, rhythmic, and conceptual territories.]]> 80 Rebecca Hazelton 0814251854 Peter 4 4.34 2012 Fair Copy (The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize)
author: Rebecca Hazelton
name: Peter
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves:
review:
4.5. Very clever, I’m quite in awe of Rebecca’s skill. As the cover states this is a suite of acrostics- quite the challenge. while excellent they don’t reach quite the same heights as her collections of poems with more relaxed frameworks, such as Vow or Gloss
]]> Poor Things 72355 Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.

The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.]]> 318 Alasdair Gray 0747562288 Peter 4 3.92 1992 Poor Things
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Peter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves:
review:
The novel has a set of supporting elements not covered in the film, and quite a different feel that is more based on a past that resembles that we know, than is the alternative past/future of the movie script. The script is excellent and selected wisely from the available materials in the novel. Without giving much away, the novel starts with the discovery of a set of documents including a book/diary by Bella/Victoria's husband and a letter from Bella/Victoria describing her reaction to the contents of that book. After the setup of the discovery of these documents we dive into the book itself, and only get to Bella/Victoria's thoughts afterwards, and we also get a set of 'supporting' documentation of one kind or another from Alasdair Gray. Many of the roles within the stories are quite distinct from what they are in the film script, though also often related. A good example is Wedderburn, Bell's early lover who she wraps around her finger from day 1 in the novel. An extremely creative mix of social commentary and fiction. If I had not previously seen the film I think reading the novel first followed by watching the movie would have been a better sequence, but what can you do?
]]> Drylands 2888577 294 Thea Astley 0140283803 Peter 4 The stories written by our writer vary in quality, some are OK but not great, and a few are quite predictable, but many are very good. I did like many of the oppressed characters, and some that you don't get to know well you still have a vast sympathy for, poor, poor Benny, and pretty much every woman. It takes some extraordinary guts for any of the characters to break out of the terrible cycles. ]]> 3.80 1999 Drylands
author: Thea Astley
name: Peter
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/08
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves:
review:
An interesting if bleak read. A set of short stories written by the proprietress of the newsagency in an outback town illustrates the depravity of the chauvinist pigs that lord over their dying hell hole. Anyone that breaks ranks is crushed by their 'mates', vicious bored teens, or local politics and corruption.
The stories written by our writer vary in quality, some are OK but not great, and a few are quite predictable, but many are very good. I did like many of the oppressed characters, and some that you don't get to know well you still have a vast sympathy for, poor, poor Benny, and pretty much every woman. It takes some extraordinary guts for any of the characters to break out of the terrible cycles.
]]> <![CDATA[They Were Counted (The Transylvanian Trilogy, #1)]]> 16071756 696 Miklós Bánffy 0375712291 Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.44 1934 They Were Counted (The Transylvanian Trilogy, #1)
author: Miklós Bánffy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gormenghast Trilogy (Gormenghast, #1-3)]]> 215702729
A crumbling castle the size of a city. A menagerie of sinister eccentrics. A labyrinth of ritual, mystery and conspiracy. This is the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, three masterpieces of the fantastic � Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) � collected by Folio in an edition as fantastical as the books themselves. A new and innovative vision of these classic works, this box-set collection is truly worthy of one of the wildest imaginations in literature.

An author, poet, playwright and artist, Peake wrote with a painter’s eye. His peculiar flair for life and color is perfectly captured in brand-new illustrations by award-winning artist and designer Dave McKean, who provides the collection’s 142 original hand-drawn illustrations, as well as startling cover designs for each book. The trilogy has cast its spell over generations of readers, writers, illustrators and musicians, and award-winning fantasist Neil Gaiman � yet another Peake devotee � examines the trilogy’s appeal in his expert introduction to this unique Folio edition.

A DREAM OF SHADOWS AND SECRETS
The Gormenghast trilogy is a mesmerizing dynastic saga, often surreal and darkly comic, in which the eccentric House of Groan rules over a world of crumbling stone and meaningless ritual. This royal household soon find themselves threatened not only by the ill-omened birth of Titus but also the rapid ascent of a Machiavellian kitchen boy named Steerpike, a character long recognized as one of the most compelling and complex villains in English literature. The trilogy quickly outgrew its cult reputation, its popularity skyrocketing following the author’s death in 1968, and the novels remain without precedent. They echo the grotesquery of Dickens, the cruel fabulism of Lewis Carroll, and the wonder and scope of Tolkien, yet Gormenghast continues to defy categorization. A grand and gothic dream come true, this lavish edition of the Gormenghast trilogy offers a modern testament to Peake’s timeless creative genius.

PRODUCTION DETAILS
Three volume set
Three-quarter bound in blocked cloth with a blocked cloth front board
Set in Albertina
1,376 pages in total over three volumes�
Printed in color throughout�
142 color illustrations integrated throughout the three volumes�
Printed endpapers
Printed slipcase
10˝ x 6¾˝
Printed in Slovakia]]> 1376 Mervyn Peake Peter 0 to-read, own-tbr 4.00 1959 The Gormenghast Trilogy (Gormenghast, #1-3)
author: Mervyn Peake
name: Peter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read, own-tbr
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Tales]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Peter 4 3.92 1911 Death in Venice and Other Tales
author: Thomas Mann
name: Peter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1911
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]>