Max B's bookshelf: all

Max B's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 26 May 2023 10:57:46 -0700 60 Max B's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Dog of the South 62848086 260 Charles Portis Max B 5 3.88 1979

author: Charles Portis
name: Max B
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/26
date added: 2023/05/26
shelves:
review:
This was not Norwood but it was still good, actually.
]]> Pierrot Mon Ami 424760 Pierrot Mon Ami, is considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau's finest achievements, it's a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women's skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity.

This "innocent" implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously skewed style (admirably re-created by Barbara Wright, Queneau's principle translator).]]> 160 Raymond Queneau 1564783979 Max B 5 3.93 1942 Pierrot Mon Ami

author: Raymond Queneau
name: Max B
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/19
date added: 2023/05/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: Stories]]> 6639432
Fondly yet sharply drawn, Wolff's characters stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path."]]> 194 Tobias Wolff 0061868221 Max B 5 4.16 1981 In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: Stories

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: Stories

author: Tobias Wolff
name: Max B
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/16
date added: 2023/05/16
shelves:
review:
Wonderful, and one step closer to understanding my friend Jake.
]]> The Secret of the Rosary 19410878 ART I - WHAT THE ROSARY IS
First Rose The prayers of the Rosary
A White Rose
A Red Rose
A Mystical Rose Tree
God Alone
A Rosebud
FIRST DECADE
The surpassing merit of the Rosary as seen in its origin and name.
First Rose: Prayers
Second Rose: Origin and Name
Third Rose: Saint Dominic
Fourth Rose: Blessed Alan de la Roche
Fifth Rose: Confraternity
Sixth Rose: Mary's Psalter
Seventh Rose: Crown of Roses
Eighth Rose: Marvels of the Rosary
Ninth Rose: Enemies
Tenth Rose: Miracles
SECOND DECADE
The surpassing merit of the Rosary as seen in the prayers which compose it.
Eleventh Rose: The Creed
Twelfth Rose: The Our Father
Thirteenth Rose: Our Father Part 2
Fourteenth Rose: Our Father Part 3
Fifteenth Rose: Hail Mary
Sixteenth Rose: Hail Mary �� Beauty
Seventeenth Rose: Hail Mary - Fruits
Eighteenth Rose: Hail Mary �� Blessings
Nineteenth Rose: Happy Exchange
Twentieth Rose: Brief explanation of the Hail Mary
THIRD DECADE
The surpassing merit of the holy Rosary as a meditation on the life and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ
Twenty-first Rose: The Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary
Twenty-second Rose: The Meditation of the Mysteries makes us resemble Jesus
Twenty-third Rose: The Rosary is a Memorial of the Life and Death of Jesus
Twenty-fourth Rose: Meditation on the Mysteries of the Rosary is a great means of perfection
Twenty-fifth Rose: The Riches of Holiness contained in the Prayers and Meditations of the Rosary
Twenty-sixth Rose: Sublime Prayer
Twenty-seventh Rose: Benefits
Twenty-eighth Rose: Salutary Effects
Twenty-ninth Rose: Means of Salvation
Thirtieth Rose: Confraternity Privileges
FOURTH DECADE
The surpassing merit of the holy Rosary as seen in the wonders God has worked through it.
Thirty-first Rose: Blanche of Castille - Alphonsus VIII
Thirty-second Rose: Don Perez
Thirty-third Rose: A Diabolical Possession
Thirty-fourth Rose: Simone de Mortfort, Alan de Lanvallay, And Othere
Thirty-fifth Rose: Cardinal Pierre
Thirty-sixth Rose: Freed From Satan
Thirty-seventh Rose: A Monastery Reformed
Thirty-eighth Rose: A Bishop's Devotion
Thirty-ninth Rose: A Parish Transformed
Fortieth Rose: Admirable Effects
FIFTH DECADE
How to say the Rosary worthily
Forty-first Rose: Purity of Intention
Forty-second Rose: With Attention
Forty-third Rose: Fighting Distractions
Forty-fourth Rose: A Good Method
Forty-fifth Rose: With Reverence
Forty-sixth Rose: Group Recitation
Forty-seventh Rose: Proper Dispositions
Forty-eighth Rose: Perseverance
Forty-ninth Rose: Indulgences
Fiftieth Rose: Various Methods
Methods of Saying the Most Holy Rosary so as to Draw Upon Our Souls the Grace of the Mysteries of the Life, Passion and Glory of Jesus and Mary]]> 95 Louis de Montfort Max B 5 4.54 1710 The Secret of the Rosary

author: Louis de Montfort
name: Max B
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1710
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/16
date added: 2023/05/16
shelves:
review:
I know the secret and it’s glorious!
]]> The Human Comedy 12960187
Gentle, poignant and richly autobiographical, this delightful novel shows us the boy becoming the man in a world that even in the midst of war, appears sweeter, safer and more livable than out own.]]> William Saroyan Max B 5
Very Great Book ]]> 4.04 1943 The Human Comedy

author: William Saroyan
name: Max B
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1943
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/15
date added: 2023/05/15
shelves:
review:
You can’t know what a book says, Ulysses, unless you can read, and I can’t read.

Very Great Book
]]> Norwood 59968556 272 Charles Portis Max B 5 Wonderful 4.17 1966 Norwood

author: Charles Portis
name: Max B
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2023/05/09
shelves:
review:
Wonderful
]]> The Seven Storey Mountain 18869102 ]]> 468 Thomas Merton 0547543816 Max B 5 4.30 1948

author: Thomas Merton
name: Max B
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1948
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/06
date added: 2023/05/06
shelves:
review:
I’m a different guy now, after having read this book.
]]> The Violent Bear It Away 18071176 The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousins, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle--that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensues: Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more "reasonable" modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul.

O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writers acutely alert to where the sacred lives and to where it does not.]]> 256 Flannery O'Connor Max B 5 4.13 1960 The Violent Bear It Away

author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Max B
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/20
date added: 2023/04/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The Power and the Glory 39214757 This prize-winning novel of a fugitive priest in Mexico is quite simply “Graham Greene’s masterpiece�� (John Updike, The New York Review of Books). �� In the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, all vestiges of Catholicism are being outlawed by the government. As churches are razed, icons are banned, and the price of devotion is execution, an unnamed member of the clergy flees. He’s known only as the “whisky priest.�� Beset by heretical vices, guilt, and an immoral past, he’s torn between self-destruction and self-preservation. Too modest to be a martyr, too stubborn to follow the law, and too craven to take a bullet, he now travels as one of the hunted—attending, in secret, to the spiritual needs of the faithful. When a peasant begs him to return to Tabasco to hear the confessions of a dying man, the whisky priest knows it’s a trap. But it’s also his duty—and possibly his salvation. �� Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels written since 1923, The Power and the Glory is “a violent, raw�� work on “suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption�� (The Atlantic).]]> 157 Graham Greene Max B 5 4.09 1940

author: Graham Greene
name: Max B
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/03
date added: 2023/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International)]]> 10385073 Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist.��It tells a love story troubled by incest. ��It is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.�� Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously��sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.]]> 724 Vladimir Nabokov Max B 5 The last OG. 4.19 1969 Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International)

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International)

author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Max B
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2023/03/23
shelves:
review:
The last OG.
]]> The Second Coming 11787044 A successful man’s midlife crisis may just provide a twisted path to happiness in this New York Times–bestselling novel by the author of The Last Gentleman.��Now in his late forties, Will Barrett lives a life other men only dream of. Wealthy from a successful career on Wall Street and from the inheritance of his deceased wife’s estate, Will is universally admired at the club where he spends his days golfing in the North Carolina sun. But everything begins to unravel when, without warning, Will’s golf shots begin landing in the rough, and he is struck with bouts of losing his balance and falling over. Just when Will appears doomed to share the fate of his father—whose suicide has haunted him his whole life—a mental hospital escapee named Allison might prove to be the only one who can save him.��Original and profound, The Second Coming is a moving love story of two damaged souls who find peace with each other.]]> 370 Walker Percy 1453216308 Max B 0 3.85 1980

author: Walker Percy
name: Max B
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/27
date added: 2023/02/27
shelves:
review:
You should read a bunch of Walker Percy books in a row if you’re feeling middle/lightheartedly about everything going on, and probably shouldn’t if you feel crazy. Of course I loved a great deal of this book.
]]> The Last Gentleman 11787042 National Book Award A lonely Southerner forges a surprising bond with a New York family in this “brilliant�� novel by the author of The Moviegoer (Time).��Will Barrett has never felt at peace. After moving from his native South to New York City, Will’s most meaningful human connections come through the lens of a telescope in Central Park, from which he views the comings and goings of the eccentric Vaught family.��But Will’s days as a spectator end when he meets the Vaught patriarch and accepts a job in the Mississippi Delta as caretaker for the family’s ailing son, Jamie. Once there, he is confronted not only by his personal demons, but also his growing love for Jamie’s sister, Kitty, and a deepening relationship with the Vaught family that will teach him the true meaning of home.]]> 418 Walker Percy Max B 5 3.56 1966 The Last Gentleman

author: Walker Percy
name: Max B
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1966
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/09
date added: 2023/02/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World]]> 838478 403 Walker Percy 0374193029 Max B 5 3.91 1971

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

author: Walker Percy
name: Max B
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/03
date added: 2023/02/03
shelves:
review:
If a man wants, works, and waits, he can have. Great one.
]]> The Blue Flowers 28370
Incapaces de descubrir quién sueña con quién, nos adentraremos en un mundo cómico y épico a la vez capaz de provocar carcajadas o de mover a la reflexión. Los juegos del lenguaje, el anacronismo o las citas permiten a Raymond Queneau crear un singular escenario sobre el que cuestiona el sentido de la historia, de las ideologías y de la propia escritura.

Queneau, uno de los autores más imaginativos y lúdicos de la literatura moderna integra varias lecturas en una: una novela de amor, un juego entre el sueño y la realidad o una parodia de la novela histórica. Pero Flores azules es, ante todo, una narración asombrosamente divertida y de una riqueza estilística y referencial desbordante. Una novela que invita a ser leída una y otra vez y a descubrir los secretos que esconde en cada una de sus páginas.]]> 232 Raymond Queneau 0811209458 Max B 5 ]]> 4.06 1965 The Blue Flowers

author: Raymond Queneau
name: Max B
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/26
date added: 2023/01/26
shelves:
review:
“Another fucking fiasco.��

]]> The Poor Mouth 59641 The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on narratives of Gaelic Ireland, this work brought down on the author's head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941.]]> 128 Flann O'Brien 1564780910 Max B 4 4.09 1941 The Poor Mouth

author: Flann O'Brien
name: Max B
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1941
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/14
date added: 2023/01/14
shelves:
review:
My ancestors lived through tremendous hardship, and I will too. I like this relentless fucker.
]]> The Last Days 28372 250 Raymond Queneau 1564781402 Max B 5 3.91 1936

author: Raymond Queneau
name: Max B
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/10
date added: 2023/01/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Song of the Lark (Great Plains Trilogy, #2)]]> 516035
It is in the solitude of a tiny rock chamber high in the side of an Arizona cliff--"a cleft in the heart of the world"--that Thea comes face to face with her own dreams and desires, stripped clean by the haunting purity of the ruined cliff dwellings and inspired by the whisperings of their ancient dust. Here she finds the courage to seize her future and to use her gifts to catch "the shining, elusive element that is life itself--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose." In prose as shimmering and piercingly true as the light in a desert canyon, Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self.

"The time will come when she will be ranked above Hemingway." --Leon Edel]]> 448 Willa Cather 0375706453 Max B 4 4.01 1915 The Song of the Lark (Great Plains Trilogy, #2)

The Song of the Lark (Great Plains Trilogy, #2)

author: Willa Cather
name: Max B
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/05
date added: 2023/01/05
shelves:
review:

]]> The Moviegoer 10739
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is adrift. He occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a quest - a harebrained search for authenticity that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the gaudy chaos of the French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, "The Moviegoer" is a genuine American classic.]]> 242 Walker Percy 0375701966 Max B 5 3.66 1961

author: Walker Percy
name: Max B
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/12
date added: 2022/12/12
shelves:
review:
Grabbed me by my ankles, flipped me upside down and shook me for all I was worth.
]]> Odile 374247 119 Raymond Queneau 1564782093 Max B 5 3.73 1937 Odile

author: Raymond Queneau
name: Max B
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/15
date added: 2022/12/05
shelves:
review:
No matter how hard you try, you can’t help but fall in love with a woman. Thanks, Justin, for lending me this.
]]> Witch Grass 28371 Witch Grass (previously titled The Bark Tree) is a philosophical farce, an epic comedy, a mesmerizing novel about the daily grind that is an enchantment itself.]]> 328 Raymond Queneau 1590170318 Max B 5 Masterful 3.96 1933 Witch Grass

author: Raymond Queneau
name: Max B
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1933
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/05
date added: 2022/12/05
shelves:
review:
Masterful
]]> Franny and Zooey 5113 ‘Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.��

First published in The New Yorker as two sequential stories, ‘Franny�� and ‘Zooey�� offer a dual portrait of the two youngest members of J. D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family.

Franny Glass is a pretty, effervescent college student on a date with her intellectually confident boyfriend, Lane. They appear to be the perfect couple, but as they struggle to communicate with each other about the things they really care about, slowly their true feelings come to the surface. The second story in this book, ‘Zooey��, plunges us into the world of her ethereal, sophisticated family. When Franny’s emotional and spiritual doubts reach new heights, her older brother Zooey, a misanthropic former child genius, offers her consolation and brotherly advice.

Written in Salinger’s typically irreverent style, these two stories offer a touching snapshot of the distraught mindset of early adulthood and are full of the insightful emotional observations and witty turns of phrase that have helped make Salinger’s reputation what it is today.]]> 201 J.D. Salinger 0316769029 Max B 0 3.97 1957 Franny and Zooey

author: J.D. Salinger
name: Max B
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at: 2022/11/26
date added: 2022/11/26
shelves:
review:
I don’t know. I would’ve had a better time reading The Way of a Pilgrim. Some very sweet moments, though.
]]> Zazie in the Metro 28369 A metro strike sends country-girl Zazie on a crazy Parisian adventure in this comic cult classic

Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute.

Queneau's cult classic was made into a hugely successful film by Louis Malle in 1960. Packed full of word play and phonetic games, Zazie in the Metro remains as stylish and witty today as it did back then.]]> 157 Raymond Queneau 0142180041 Max B 5 3.76 1959

author: Raymond Queneau
name: Max B
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/22
date added: 2022/11/22
shelves:
review:
Talk, talk. That’s all you can do.
]]> Nine Stories 4009
The stories are:

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut"
"Just Before the War with the Eskimos"
"The Laughing Man"
"Down at the Dinghy"
"For Esmé �� with Love and Squalor"
"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes"
"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period"
"Teddy"]]> 302 J.D. Salinger 0316767727 Max B 0 Esme, nuff said. 4.20 1953 Nine Stories

author: J.D. Salinger
name: Max B
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at: 2022/11/21
date added: 2022/11/21
shelves:
review:
Esme, nuff said.
]]> The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 517188 150 Muriel Spark 0060931736 Max B 4 3.73 1961

author: Muriel Spark
name: Max B
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/17
date added: 2022/11/17
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed this a good deal. Very funny and exciting to read. I will read more of her work soon!
]]> <![CDATA[The Land Breakers (NYRB Classics)]]> 20758162 The Land Breakers is a saga like the Norse sagas or the book of Genesis, a story of first and last things, of the violence of birth and death, of inescapable sacrifice and the faltering emergence of community.

Mooney and Imy Wright, twenty-one, former indentured servants, long habituated to backbreaking work but not long married, are traveling west. They arrive in a no-account settlement in North Carolina and, on impulse, part with all their savings to acquire a patch of land high in the mountains. With a little livestock and a handful of crude tools, they enter the mountain world—one of transcendent beauty and cruel necessity—and begin to make a world of their own.

Mooney and Imy are the first to confront an unsettled country that is sometimes paradise and sometimes hell. They will soon be followed by others.

John Ehle is a master of the American language. He has an ear for dialogue and an eye for nature and a grasp of character that have established The Land Breakers as one of the great fictional reckonings with the making of America.]]> 368 John Ehle 1590177630 Max B 5 I really love this book. 4.30 1964 The Land Breakers (NYRB Classics)

author: John Ehle
name: Max B
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/13
date added: 2022/11/13
shelves:
review:
I really love this book.
]]> O Pioneers! 140963 O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.

At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.]]> 159 Willa Cather 0679743626 Max B 5 Incredible 3.89 1913 O Pioneers!

author: Willa Cather
name: Max B
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/03
date added: 2022/11/03
shelves:
review:
Incredible
]]> A Lost Lady 28416584 174 Willa Cather Max B 4 3.60 1923

author: Willa Cather
name: Max B
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1923
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/10/27
shelves:
review:
Lovely, thanks Jake for lending me this.
]]> My Brother Yves 1342096 236 Pierre Loti 1430486422 Max B 0 to-read 4.50 1883

author: Pierre Loti
name: Max B
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1883
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/10/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Wayfarers: A Novel 2148821 The Road Leads On in 1933.
The events in Wayfarers take place between 1864 and the 1870s. The entire trilogy describes the conflict between a traditional subsistence economy and a modern commercial and industrial society, as it emerged in Norway in the second half of the 1800s and the early 1900s. August is the main character that ties the three novels together.]]> 464 Knut Hamsun 0374515921 Max B 5 4.38 1927 Wayfarers: A Novel

author: Knut Hamsun
name: Max B
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1927
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/24
date added: 2022/10/24
shelves:
review:
Maybe the last Hamsun I’ll read this year. Enjoyed every second.
]]> Morning and Evening 26221990 109 Jon Fosse Max B 3 3.97 2000

author: Jon Fosse
name: Max B
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2022/10/06
shelves:
review:
I didn’t like the way this book was written. But I read it all anyway.
]]> Beyond Sing the Woods 2329026 For the 2005 Norwegian edition, see: ISBN13: 9788203189081.

The story of three generations of an old-lineage Norwegian family making their life in the northern woods (circa 1750's.) Main themes are the struggle between tradition and innovation, the prejudices of pastoral society, and a study in human nature and man's ability to make peace with it.]]> 333 Trygve Gulbranssen 9997513053 Max B 0 to-read 4.47 1933 Beyond Sing the Woods

author: Trygve Gulbranssen
name: Max B
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1933
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/10/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rock Crystal 2871400 76 Adalbert Stifter 159017285X Max B 4 3.80 1853

author: Adalbert Stifter
name: Max B
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1853
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/10/03
shelves:
review:
Beautiful. Warmed me up like their grandma’s coffee extract.
]]> Manalive (Hilarious Stories) 899146 Manalive pits a group of disillusioned young people against Mr. Innocent Smith, a bubbly, high-spirited gentleman who literally falls into their midst. Later accused of murder and denounced for philandering everywhere he goes, Smith prompts his newfound acquaintances to recognize an important idea in most unexpected ways.]]> 127 G.K. Chesterton 0486414051 Max B 3 Had some great parts! 4.19 1912 Manalive (Hilarious Stories)

author: G.K. Chesterton
name: Max B
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1912
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2022/10/02
shelves:
review:
Had some great parts!
]]> Mysteries 32584 Mysteries (1892) is the story of Johan Nilsen Nagel, a mysterious stranger who suddenly turns up in a small Norwegian town one summer-and just as suddenly disappears. Nagel is a complete outsider, a sort of modern Christ treated in a spirit of near parody. He condemns the politics and thought of the age, brings comfort to the insulted and injured and gains the love of two women suggestive of the biblical Mary and Martha. But there is a sinister side of him: in his vest he carries a vial of Prussic acid. The novel creates a powerful sense of Nagel's stream of thought, as he increasingly withdraws into the torture chamber of his own subconscious psyche.]]> 313 Knut Hamsun 0141186186 Max B 5 3.96 1892 Mysteries

author: Knut Hamsun
name: Max B
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1892
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/09/27
shelves:
review:
Crazy and wonderful. I love this guy so much.
]]> <![CDATA[The Sorrows of Young Werther. Novella]]> 394908
Includes "Novella".]]> 201 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0679729518 Max B 5 3.92 1774

author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Max B
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1774
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/09/15
shelves:
review:
I liked that. Don’t let desire consume you!
]]> Station Island 834699 Field Work (1979), is set on an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. Heaney's pilgrim is on an inner journey and proceeds through a series of dream encounters which lead him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called this narrative sequence "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years." It is preceded by a section of richly meditative lyrics ("Wry, spare, compressed, subtle, strange, they have a furtive intensity and exicitement." - Richard Ellmann, The New York Review of Books), and leads naturally into a third group of poems, in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary Sweeney, a king of Ulster whose story Heaney translated from the Irish.]]> 123 Seamus Heaney 0374519358 Max B 5 Read this today. 4.18 1984 Station Island

author: Seamus Heaney
name: Max B
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1984
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/09/06
shelves:
review:
Read this today.
]]> <![CDATA[Zone: Selected Poems (NYRB Poets)]]> 25430740 Zone is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett’s fifty-year engagement with the work of France’s greatest modern poet. This bilingual edition of Apollinaire’s poetry represents the full range of his achievement from traditional lyric verse to the pathbreaking visual poems he called calligrams, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. Including an introduction by the distinguished scholar Peter Read, helpful endnotes, a preface, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett, this new edition of Apollinaire stands out not only for its compact and judicious selection of the essential poems but also as the work of an important American poet. The Washington Post has said, “No praise can be too high for Ron Padgett’s translations.”]]> 251 Guillaume Apollinaire 1590179242 Max B 4 4.17 1986 Zone: Selected Poems (NYRB Poets)

author: Guillaume Apollinaire
name: Max B
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/09/03
shelves:
review:
My favorite was The Song of the Badly Loved. Appreciated the contextual notes in back of book.
]]> <![CDATA[The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare]]> 985376 G.K. Chesterton 0881842257 Max B 5 4.00 1908

author: G.K. Chesterton
name: Max B
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1908
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/08/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Day of the Locust 904254 The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathaniel West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their by their own desires--from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.]]> 167 Nathanael West 0809438410 Max B 4 3.80 1939 The Day of the Locust

author: Nathanael West
name: Max B
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/08/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Moby-Dick 927911 555 Herman Melville 0451526996 Max B 4 3.76 1851

author: Herman Melville
name: Max B
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1851
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/08/06
shelves:
review:
It was definitely very good, at the same time I did not finish it and don’t plan on doing so.
]]> Victoria (Penguin Classics) 323661
A Penguin Classic��

Set in a coastal village of late nineteenth-century Norway, Victoria follows two lovers whose yearnings are as powerful as the circumstances that conspire to thwart their romance. Johannes, a miller’s son turned poet, finds inspiration for his writing in his passionate devotion to Victoria, a daughter of the impoverished lord of the manor, who feels constrained by family loyalty to accept the wealthy young man of her father’s choice. Separated by class barriers and social pressure, the fated duo hurt and enthrall each other by turns as they move toward an emotional doom that neither will recognize until it is too late.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 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.]]> 122 Knut Hamsun 0143039377 Max B 5 3.79 1898 Victoria (Penguin Classics)

author: Knut Hamsun
name: Max B
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1898
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/06/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Pan 764431 192 Knut Hamsun 0374500169 Max B 5 4.02 1894 Pan

author: Knut Hamsun
name: Max B
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1894
rating: 5
read at: 2022/06/22
date added: 2022/06/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney]]> 28256337
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty . . .

-- Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802]]> 160 William Wordsworth 0571328784 Max B 5 3.80 1988 William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney

William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney

author: William Wordsworth
name: Max B
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/06/13
shelves:
review:

]]> When the Time Comes 395755 80 Maurice Blanchot 0930794958 Max B 4 4.00 1951

author: Maurice Blanchot
name: Max B
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/06/13
shelves:
review:

]]> Seeing Things 10197888 113 Seamus Heaney Max B 5 3.64 1991

author: Seamus Heaney
name: Max B
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/06/13
shelves:
review:

]]> Hunger 32585 134 Knut Hamsun 0486431681 Max B 4 4.09 1890 Hunger

author: Knut Hamsun
name: Max B
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1890
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/06/13
shelves:
review:

]]> Growth of the Soil 342049 435 Knut Hamsun 0394717813 Max B 5 4.27 1917

author: Knut Hamsun
name: Max B
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1917
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/06/13
shelves:
review:

]]> The Third Policeman 27208 The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.]]> 200 Flann O'Brien 156478214X Max B 4 4.00 1967 The Third Policeman

author: Flann O'Brien
name: Max B
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Temptation of Saint Anthony]]> 789432 The Temptation of Saint Anthony was Flaubert's lifelong work, thirty years in the making. Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical rendering of one night during which Anthony is besieged by carnal temptations and philosophical doubt.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reproduces the distinguished Lafcadio Hearn translation, which translator Richard Sieburth calls "a splendid period piece from one of America's premier translators of nineteenth-century French prose. In Lafcadio Hearn's Latinate rendering, Flaubert's experimental drama of the modern consciousness reads as weirdly as its oneiric original."]]> 288 Gustave Flaubert 0375759123 Max B 5 4.00 1874 The Temptation of Saint Anthony

author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Max B
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1874
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Cousin Bette 59144
Cousin Bette is a gripping tale of violent jealousy, sexual passion and treachery, and a brilliant portrayal of the grasping, bourgeois society of 1840's Paris. The culmination of the Comedie humaine, Balzac's epic chronicle of his times, it is one of his greatest triumphs as a novelist.]]> 496 Honoré de Balzac 0375759077 Max B 4 3.87 1846 Cousin Bette

author: Honoré de Balzac
name: Max B
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1846
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2022/03/17
shelves:
review:

]]> At Swim-Two-Birds 984100 217 Flann O'Brien 0140181725 Max B 5 3.59 1939

author: Flann O'Brien
name: Max B
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> An Unfortunate Woman 12571
Richard Brautigan was an original--brilliant and wickedly funny, his books resonated with the sixties, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Taken in its entirety, his body of work reveals an artistry that outreaches the literary fads that so quickly swept him up.

Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist's travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman, and a close friend's death from cancer.

After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, his only child, Ianthe Brautigan, found among his possessions the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman. It had been completed over a year earlier, but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding it was too painful to face her father's presence page after page, she put the manuscript aside.

Years later, having completed a memoir about her father's life and death, Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman, and finally, clear-eyed, she saw that it was her father's work at its best and had to be published.]]> 132 Richard Brautigan 0312277105 Max B 5 3.87 1994

author: Richard Brautigan
name: Max B
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Selected Writings: The Space Within]]> 385279 297 Henri Michaux 0811201058 Max B 5 4.22 1951

author: Henri Michaux
name: Max B
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Sentimental Education 2183 460 Gustave Flaubert 0140447970 Max B 5 3.86 1869

author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Max B
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1869
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/11/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Sluts 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 Max B 5 3.79 2004

author: Dennis Cooper
name: Max B
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/10/23
shelves:
review:

]]> I Wished 56931505 “I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.��

For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.�� In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.]]> 136 Dennis Cooper 1641293047 Max B 5 3.97 2021 I Wished

author: Dennis Cooper
name: Max B
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/10/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Puckoon 887348 Puckoon is Spike Milligan's classic slapstick novel, reissued for the first time since it was published in 1963.

In 1924 the Boundary Commission is tasked with creating the new official division between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Through incompetence, dereliction of duty and sheer perversity, the border ends up running through the middle of the small town of Puckoon.

Houses are divided from outhouses, husbands separated from wives, bars are cut off from their patrons, churches sundered from graveyards. And in the middle of it all is poor Dan Milligan, our feckless protagonist, who is taunted and manipulated by everyone (including the sadistic author) to try and make some sense of this mess . . .

Spike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he served in the Royal Artillery during WWII in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, before joining forces with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe to form the legendary Goon Show. Until his death in 2002, he had success as on stage and screen and as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories.]]> 160 Spike Milligan 0140023747 Max B 0 to-read 3.73 1963 Puckoon

author: Spike Milligan
name: Max B
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Guignol's Band 226954 284 Louis-Ferdinand Céline 0811200183 Max B 4 3.78 1944

author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
name: Max B
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1944
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/08/10
shelves:
review:

]]> The Metapheromenoi 51084969
The Metapheromenoi, which might be termed a major contribution to the post-structuralist novel or a harsh saga of degeneracy and dope, is a book of risqué blasphemies and heartbreaking beauty, a swirling adventure in which heroes and heroines eagerly shed their social masks and crumbling morals. Pulsing with frenetic lyricism, it is a behind the scenes look at neuropsychopharmacology and sexual aberration. A lust-filled, liquor-drenched skyrocket that is unlike anything else in literature.]]> 308 Brendan Connell 1645250253 Max B 0 to-read 4.46 2020 The Metapheromenoi

author: Brendan Connell
name: Max B
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dreaming of Babylon 1131032 236 Richard Brautigan 0440021464 Max B 0 3.88 1977

author: Richard Brautigan
name: Max B
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Confederate General from Big Sur]]> 99121
Brautigan's descriptions of drugs, drinks, frogs & the commas of Ecclesiastes are all done in a straightforward style. A favorite paragraph:
"He broke the seal on the bottle, unscrewed the cap & poured a big slug of whiskey into his mouth. He swallowed it down with a hairy gulp. Strange, for as I said before: he was bald." A great read.

If there's one thing the world lacks, it's a good supply of well-written, funny-as-heck books. Luckily, aside from A Confederacy Of Dunces, we have this little gem. The characters are drunks, druggies, skanks, prostitutes & nutzoids. The pace is brisk, the imagry vivid. Most of it seemed to be part of my own life, but just where do you find weed that's so potent that 4 people smoking 5 joints stay high for well over 2 hours?

If you want to spend a day or night having a good laugh over a great book, pick this one up. You'll laugh out loud. As Martha Stewart says, "it's a good thing".]]> 161 Richard Brautigan 039417271X Max B 0 4.02 1964 A Confederate General from Big Sur

author: Richard Brautigan
name: Max B
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> The Hawkline Monster 302666
But the more she tells them about the monster, the more her story unravels, until it isn't clear if the monster is even real, or if anything else is.

Richard Brautigan's classic surrealist novel has inspired for decades with its wild, witty, and bizarre encounters with western-themed psychedelia.]]> 216 Richard Brautigan 0671221566 Max B 0 3.86 1974 The Hawkline Monster

author: Richard Brautigan
name: Max B
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Là-Bas (Down There) 315298 At its center is Durtal, a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais. The legendary crimes, trial, and confession of this grotesque fifteenth-century child murderer, sadist, necrophile, and practitioner of all the black arts unfold in episode after horrifying episode. Mystical thematic threads connect this greatest of all revelers in evil with Durtal's own passionate pursuit, the reflection of a religious quest that was to lead Huysmans from uncertain agnosticism back to Catholicism.
Durtal, the mouthpiece for the strange personality of Huysmans, leads a hermit-like existence cloistered from his fashionable contemporaries. Surrounding him are others equally cut off, sharing a nostalgic longing for the Middle Ages. There is a simply religious bell-ringer, a learned astrologer, a medical doctor versed in homeopath and occult lore, and a fourth person �� a sheltered, unsatisfied bourgeois by day and mysterious succubus by night. They take refuge where they can from the forces of modern times �� in a bell tower, in abstruse knowledge, and in diabolism.
Huysmans' ability to mesmerize his readers with torrents of sound and image is itself suspiciously akin to the magic arts. His intoxication with the abominable and the depraved is magnified by his extreme sensitivity. He combines grimly realistic detail with esoteric knowledge, and searches relentlessly for the divine in the depths of evil and in the furthest reaches of human experience. The republication of this novel, along with the previous publication of Against the Grain, will make his works accessible to the larger audience that will surely find them both important and fascinating, as have Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis, and many other major literary figures.]]> 304 Joris-Karl Huysmans 0486228371 Max B 5 3.98 1891 Là-Bas (Down There)

author: Joris-Karl Huysmans
name: Max B
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1891
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Wittgenstein’s Nephew 92578 Wittgenstein’s Nephew is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and an eulogy to a real-life friendship.]]> 101 Thomas Bernhard 0226043924 Max B 0 4.09 1982 Wittgenstein’s Nephew

author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Max B
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> In Watermelon Sugar 46182 144 Richard Brautigan 0099437597 Max B 5 3.80 1968

author: Richard Brautigan
name: Max B
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Trout Fishing in America 63913
This new edition includes an introduction by the poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan's work as a student in California.]]> 112 Richard Brautigan Max B 5 3.83 1967 Trout Fishing in America

author: Richard Brautigan
name: Max B
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Last Stories and Other Stories]]> 18693671 Supernaturally tinged stories from William T. Vollmann, author of the National Book Award winner Europe Central
��
In this magnificent new work of fiction, his first in nine years, celebrated author William T. Vollmann offers a collection of ghost stories linked by themes of love, death, and the erotic.
��
A Bohemian farmer’s dead wife returns to him, and their love endures, but at a gruesome price. A geisha prolongs her life by turning into a cherry tree. A journalist, haunted by the half-forgotten killing of a Bosnian couple, watches their story, and his own wartime tragedy, slip away from him. A dying American romances the ghost of his high school sweetheart while a homeless salaryman in Tokyo animates paper cutouts of ancient heroes.
��
Are ghosts memories, fantasies, or monsters? Is there life in death? Vollmann has always operated in the shadowy borderland between categories, and these eerie tales, however far-flung their settings, all focus on the attempts of the living to avoid, control, or even seduce death. Vollmann’s stories will transport readers to a fantastical world where love and lust make anything possible.]]> 677 William T. Vollmann 0670015970 Max B 0 3.84 2014 Last Stories and Other Stories

author: William T. Vollmann
name: Max B
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Europe Central 12398 811 William T. Vollmann 0143036599 Max B 0 3.96 2005

author: William T. Vollmann
name: Max B
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Dedicated to Life 56269719 Dedicated to Life is Seth Price's new collection of fictional and poetic writings. Punctuating the narration, the artist's latest drawings depict lengthened-face characters with closed eyes in various almost surrealistic situations.

“I was about to send this to press when COVID-19 abruptly pulled us into a new age. Art made before the rupture suddenly looks different, flickering with new meanings and demeanings. My book seemed to shift colors in my hands.��

Dedicated to Life gathers recent writing by Seth Price, as well as excerpts, pieces and ruins from a novel he worked on, and abandoned, some years ago. A “personal, affectual prehistory of the Trump era,�� as he puts it, it is a fascinating read, between a fake/real memoir, a neogonzo account of the early twenty-first century in NYC, supplemented by bits of poetry and cartoons.]]> 180 Seth Price 3000659269 Max B 0 4.00 2020 Dedicated to Life

author: Seth Price
name: Max B
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Fuck Seth Price 25960377 124 Seth Price 0981546838 Max B 0 4.15 2015

author: Seth Price
name: Max B
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Goodbye, Columbus 29744
©1993 Phillip Roth (P)2009]]> 320 Philip Roth 0679601597 Max B 0 3.88 1959

author: Philip Roth
name: Max B
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Against Nature 210255 Against Nature or as Against The Grain, this wildly original fin-de-siècle novel follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes, and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. The original handbook of decadence, Against Nature exploded like a grenade (in the words of Huysmans) and has enjoyed a cult readership from its publication to the present day.]]> 288 Joris-Karl Huysmans 0140447636 Max B 5 3.88 1884

author: Joris-Karl Huysmans
name: Max B
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1884
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Death on the Installment Plan 106096 Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black comedy."

Death on the Installment Plan is the story of young Ferdinand's first 18 years. His life is one of hatred, of the grinding struggle of small shopkeepers to survive, of childhood sensations and fantasies—lusty, scatological, violent, but also poetic. There is a running battle with his ineffectual insurance clerk of a father, with his mother, who lives and whines around the junkshop she runs for the boys benefit; there is also the superbly funny Meanwell College in England, where the boy went briefly, a Dickensian, nightmare institution. Always there is humiliation, failure, and boredom, at least until he teams up with the "scientist" des Pereires. This inventor, con-man, incorrigible optimist—whose last project is to grow enormous potatoes by electricity—rescues him, if only temporarily; for the reader he is one of the most lovable charlatans in French literature.]]> 592 Louis-Ferdinand Céline 0811200175 Max B 5 4.25 1936 Death on the Installment Plan

author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
name: Max B
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Journey to the End of the Night]]> 12395 Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.]]> 453 Louis-Ferdinand Céline 0811216543 Max B 5 4.23 1932 Journey to the End of the Night

author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
name: Max B
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Work 36041537 WORK is a portrait of Bud Smith's years working construction. It's about his hilarious blue-collar family. It's about growing up in a campground in NJ, skipping college, and moving to NYC on a drunken whim. It's about making art even if that means writing a novel during 1000 consecutive lunch breaks.]]> 216 Bud Smith 1937865924 Max B 3 4.62 2017 Work

author: Bud Smith
name: Max B
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/01/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Woodcutters 92576
"Mr. Bernhard's portrait of a society in dissolution has a Scandinavian darkness reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg, but it is filtered through with a minimalist prose. . . . Woodcutters offers an unusually strange, intense, engrossing literary experience."—Mark Anderson, New York Times Book Review

"Musical, dramatic and set in Vienna, Woodcutters. . . .resembles a Strauss operetta with a libretto by Beckett."—Joseph Costes, Chicago Tribune

"Thomas Bernhard, the great pessimist-rhapsodist of German literature . . . never compromises, never makes peace with life. . . . Only in the pure, fierce isolation of his art can he get justice."—Michael Feingold, Village Voice

"In typical Bernhardian fashion the narrator is moved by hatred and affection for a society that he believes destroys the very artistic genius it purports to glorify. A superb translation."��Library Journal]]> 188 Thomas Bernhard 0226043967 Max B 5 4.23 1984 Woodcutters

author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Max B
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1984
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/16
shelves:
review:

]]> God Jr. 51593 Dennis Cooper's sparely crafted novels have earned him an international reputation-even as his subject matter has made him a controversial figure. God Jr. is a stunningly accomplished new novel that marks a new phase in Cooper's noteworthy career.

God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son - at the expense of his job and marriage - but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was?

A tender, wrenching look at guilt, grief, and the tenuous bonds of family, God Jr. is unlike anything Dennis Cooper has yet written. It is a triumphant achievement from one of our finest writers.]]> 163 Dennis Cooper 0802170110 Max B 5 3.63 2005 God Jr.

author: Dennis Cooper
name: Max B
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The Marbled Swarm 10737650 The Marbled Swarm is Dennis Cooper’s most haunting work to date. In secret passageways, hidden rooms, and the troubled mind of our narrator, a mystery perpetually takes shape—and the most compelling clue to its final nature is “the marbled swarm�� itself, a complex amalgam of language passed down from father to son.

Cooper ensnares the reader in a world of appearances, where the trappings of high art, old money, and haute cuisine obscure an unspeakable system of coercion and surrender. And as the narrator stalks an elusive truth, traveling from the French countryside to Paris and back again, the reader will be seduced by a voice only Dennis Cooper could create.]]> 208 Dennis Cooper 0061715638 Max B 5 3.48 2011 The Marbled Swarm

author: Dennis Cooper
name: Max B
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change]]> 37508405 Part memoir, part history, part journalistic expos��, Trip is a look at psychedelic drugs, literature, and alienation from one of the twenty-first century's most innovative novelists--The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a new generation. A Vintage Original.

While reeling from one of the most creative--but at times self-destructive--outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin's first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe?

In exploring these ideas and detailing his experiences with psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis, Lin takes readers on a trip through nature, his own past, psychedelic culture, and the unknown.]]> 320 Tao Lin 1101974516 Max B 0 3.78 2018 Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change

Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change

author: Tao Lin
name: Max B
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/07/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Taipei 16041828
Taipei is an ode - or lament - to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas.

From one of this generation's most talked-about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal and uncompromising novel about memory, love, and what it means to be alive.]]> 248 Tao Lin 0307950174 Max B 5 3.35 2013 Taipei

author: Tao Lin
name: Max B
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Oval 41809056
But when Louis returns home from his mother's funeral in America, Anja is convinced he has changed. He seems to be in denial of his grief and newly idealistic, consumed by a secret project at the NGO where he works as an artist-consultant. Anja is horrified when she discovers what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. Louis is convinced that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable.

Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.]]> 320 Elvia Wilk 1593764057 Max B 0 3.38 2019 Oval

author: Elvia Wilk
name: Max B
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said]]> 22584
When he finally found a man who would agree to counterfeiting such cards for him, that man turned out to be a police informer. And then Taverner found out not only what it was like to be a nobody but also to be hunted by the whole apparatus of society.

It was obvious that in some way Taverner had become the pea in in some sort of cosmic shell game—but how? And why?

Philip K. Dick takes the reader on a walking tour of solipsism's scariest margin in his latest novel about the age we are already half into.]]> 204 Philip K. Dick 1857983416 Max B 5 3.93 1974 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

author: Philip K. Dick
name: Max B
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Cat’s Cradle 135479 Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he's the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh...]]> 306 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Max B 0 4.17 1963 Cat’s Cradle

author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Max B
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.��

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Max B 0 4.10 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five

author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Max B
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]]> 36402034 258 Philip K. Dick Max B 0 4.16 1968

author: Philip K. Dick
name: Max B
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Map and the Territory (Vintage International)]]> 13536314 ��
Jed Martin is an artist. His first photographs feature Michelin road maps, and global success arrives with his series on portraits of various personalities, including a writer named Houellebecq. Not long afterward, Jed helps a police inspector solve a heinous crime that leaves lasting marks on everyone involved. But after burying his father and growing old himself, Jed also discovers serenity, a deeply moving conclusion to a life of lovers, friends, and family, and filled with hopes, losses, and dreams.]]> 288 Michel Houellebecq 0307946533 Max B 5 4.13 2010 The Map and the Territory (Vintage International)

The Map and the Territory (Vintage International)

author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Max B
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Oblivion 6749
Mister squishy --
The soul is not a smithy --
Incarnations of burned children --
Another pioneer --
Good old neon --
Philosophy and the mirror of nature --
Oblivion --
The suffering channel]]> 329 David Foster Wallace 0316010766 Max B 5 4.09 2004

author: David Foster Wallace
name: Max B
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> The Ask 6698001 The Ask is a burst of genius by a young American master who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.]]> 296 Sam Lipsyte 0374298912 Max B 5 3.29 2010 The Ask

author: Sam Lipsyte
name: Max B
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Serotonin 44453053
Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is "dying of sadness." His young girlfriend hates him, his career is pretty much over, and he has to keep himself highly medicated to cope with day-to-day city life.

Struggling with "sex, male angst, solitude, consumerism, globalisation, urban planning, and more sex" (The Economist), Labrouste decides to head for the hills, returning to Normandy, where he once worked promoting regional cheeses, and where, too, he had once been in love, and even—it now seems—happy. There he finds a countryside devastated by globalization and European agricultural policies, and local farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to what they remember as a golden age: the smaller world of the premodern era.

As the farmers prepare for what might be an armed insurrection, it becomes clear that the health of one miserable body and a suffering body politic are not so different, in the end, and that all concerned may be rushing toward a catastrophe a whole drugstore's worth of antidepressants won't be enough to make bearable.]]> 309 Michel Houellebecq 0374261024 Max B 5 3.58 2019 Serotonin

author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Max B
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/11/25
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Soumission 23929479
Le talent de l’auteur, sa force visionnaire nous entraînent sur un terrain ambigu et glissant ; son regard sur notre civilisation vieillissante fait coexister dans ce roman les intuitions poétiques, les effets comiques, une mélancolie fataliste.

Ce livre est une saisissante fable politique et morale.

]]> 300 Michel Houellebecq 2081354802 Max B 5 3.71 2015 Soumission

author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Max B
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Speedboat 129344 One of the most acclaimed novels of the late 20th century is back.

When members of the National Book Critics Circle were polled to see which book they would most like to see republished, they chose Speedboat—“by far.�� This story of a young female newspaper reporter coming of age in New York City was originally published serially in the New Yorker; it is made out of seemingly unrelated vignettes—tart observations distilled through relentless intellect—which add up to an analysis of our brittle, urban existence. It remains as fresh as when it was first published.

]]> 192 Renata Adler 0060971436 Max B 3 3.78 1976 Speedboat

author: Renata Adler
name: Max B
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1976
rating: 3
read at: 2020/02/21
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
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 Max B 5 3.88 1985 White Noise

author: Don DeLillo
name: Max B
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Bad Behavior 251356 Emperor of the Air has there been such excitement surrounding a debut short-story collection.

Daisy's valentine --
A romantic weekend --
something nice --
An affair, edited --
Connection --
Trying to be --
Secretary --
Other factors --
Heaven]]> 208 Mary Gaitskill Max B 5 3.90 1988 Bad Behavior

author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Max B
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> La carte et le territoire 8710484
Il évoquerait certainement Olga, une très jolie Russe rencontrée au début de sa carrière, lors d’une première exposition de son travail photographique à partir de cartes routières Michelin. C’était avant que le succès mondial n’arrive avec la série des « métiers », ces portraits de personnalités de tous milieux (dont l’écrivain Michel Houellebecq), saisis dans l’exercice de leur profession.

Il devrait dire aussi comment il aida le commissaire Jasselin à élucider une atroce affaire criminelle, dont la terrifiante mise en scène marqua durablement les équipes de police.

Sur la fin de sa vie il accédera à une certaine sérénité, et n’émettra plus que des murmures.

L’art, l’argent, l’amour, le rapport au père, la mort, le travail, la France devenue un paradis touristique sont quelques-uns des thèmes de ce roman, résolument classique et ouvertement moderne.

]]> 428 Michel Houellebecq 2081246333 Max B 0 3.96 2010 La carte et le territoire

author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Max B
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Essays and Fictions 42629301
"Searingly honest, brilliant and disturbing . Brad Phillips peels back the skin and bone and stares right into the human soul." —Anthony Bourdain

"Brad Phillips says, at the beginning of this incredible book, that honesty eludes him. Obviously, that’s a lie. When you read Brad Phillips, you understand why nice women write love letters to men on death row." —Sarah Nicole Prickett

"Last week, Giancarlo Di Trapano turned me on to Suicidal Realism, a short memoir by the Canadian painter Brad Phillips. It’s not exactly an edifying book. Phillips’s main themes are drugs and sex, in that order: “People who like to get fucked up with other people are not people I like to get fucked up with.�� But Phillips has a watchful intelligence and self-knowledge, and an impatient sincerity, that sneak up on you (or at least, snuck up on me). He doesn’t ask to be liked, even by his groupies, but he does want to communicate: “I’m not interested in the ones who are drawn to the creator of the work, I’m interested in the ones who are drawn to the content.�� —The Paris Review]]> 300 Brad Phillips Max B 5 4.41 2019 Essays and Fictions

author: Brad Phillips
name: Max B
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/12/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Atomised 58371
Atomised tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is the dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines.]]> 379 Michel Houellebecq Max B 4 3.67 1998 Atomised

author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Max B
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/08/23
shelves:
review:

]]>