Sarah's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:27:20 -0700 60 Sarah's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[A Space on the Side of the Road]]> 2885250 A Space on the Side of the Road vividly evokes an other America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and hollers. To Kathleen Stewart, this particular other exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women just settin' track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated storytelling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of just talk, Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal space on the side of the road. It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by progress.


Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book uses both language and photographs to help readers encounter a fragmented and betrayed community, one occupied by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an official America. Holding at bay any attempts at definitive, social scientific analysis, Stewart has concocted a new sort of ethnographic writing that conveys the immediacy, density, texture, and materiality of the coal camps. A Space on the Side of the Road finally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about America.

-- "American Journal of Sociology"]]> 264 Kathleen Stewart 0691011044 Sarah 2 2.75 1996 A Space on the Side of the Road
author: Kathleen Stewart
name: Sarah
average rating: 2.75
book published: 1996
rating: 2
read at: 2009/02/01
date added: 2020/04/23
shelves:
review:
What I learned from this book is that ethnography creeps me out. Especially when it's focused on examining a culture (in this case, rural "old weird America" in coal country/West Virginia/Appalachia) that I identify with, and, in some ways, belong to. Okay, I've only read the first thirty pages, but so far I'm most intrigued by the way she makes the textures of rural speech apparent by italicizing dialectical modifications. It seems like that's a pretty standard ethnographic practice, but it puts me on edge in this case because almost everything she italicizes seems like a totally regular thing that I either grew up saying or say still. It's a strange experience, to read a text that acknowledges the "otherness" of this culture that I belong to, while also possessing the critical vocabulary that diagnoses my outsider status. Not that my outsider status is some kind of stable entity anyway--most people don't seem to believe that I'm a country girl, or that Pennsylvania's got plenty of shacks and hollers and whatnots, and in any case my claim for authenticity is kind of fucked because I wasn't really an acknowledged native daughter since my parents were outsiders who moved in with their masters degrees and uppity liberal ideas. All of which is to say, this is a pretty rich reading experience because most of this stuff is already on my mind, in some low-grade way, most of the time.
]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 36552920
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522115 Sarah 0 to-read 3.57 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[If on a Winter's Night a Traveler]]> 350812 Based on a witty analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino, of course, are constantly and comically frustrated. In between chasing missing chapters of the book, the hapless readers tangle with an international conspiracy, a rogue translator, an elusive novelist, a disintegrating publishing house, and several oppressive governments. The result is a literary labyrinth of storylines that interrupt one another - an Arabian Nights of the postmodern age.]]> 260 Italo Calvino 0919630235 Sarah 5 4.05 1979 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
author: Italo Calvino
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2007/11/25
date added: 2017/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Girls 26893819 355 Emma Cline 081299860X Sarah 3
Such fascinations are at the heart of this novel, in which 14-year-old Evie Boyd escapes her becalmed pre-boarding school summer by forging her way into a Manson-esque cult. Russell, the leader, is only nominally the object of her obsession, though; Suzanne, the group's dead-eyed, ride-or-die queen is the actual subject of Evie's infatuation, and everything Evie does that summer (including stealing from her mother's pocketbook and accepting assignations with Russell) is done to please or impress Suzanne. In fact, Evie sits out the novel's fictionalized version of the Cielo Drive murders only because Suzanne had dismissed her that night.

Evie lives with the knowledge that she would most likely have been a willing participant in those murders save for whatever quirk of Suzanne's mood that day spared her. The book makes the argument again and again that 1960s girlhood is about waiting for your social cues so you can produce the desired performance, and that people who yearn to be seen and accepted will do ugly acts to keep any love they find, making them a prey to manipulation.

"The Girls" is incredibly eloquent and voluble on gender, but completely disavows race, a staggering omission when you consider that Charles Manson's entire objective, in making bad pop songs and ordering celebrity murders alike, was to cause a race war. He wasn't just grooming women to join his ranks in order to satisfy his ego, enact sexual violence, or develop an audience for generic messianic ramblings. He was carrying out a white supremacist project in which the ultimate goal was white sovereignty. I know, I know, "The Girls" is fiction. But in a book otherwise so faithful to a widely recognized historical touchstone, what does it mean that race is the only major omission?

This year, lots of white writers of a certain generation or odiousness (ahem, Shriver) whined publicly that critiques of cultural appropriation basically amounted to thought-policing and that white writers can and should occupy any racial or cultural identity they wish to through their characters, for all writers are pro-truth, pro-human, blah blah blah blah! That is a disgusting white supremacist idea, and here's why: 1) It presumes a white tyranny over POC bodies, even and maybe especially imaginary ones 2) It presumes that the only way to write about race is by occupying POC bodies, implying that whiteness is not even a race but rather a default and also that white access to POC bodies is never to be questioned 3) It divests itself of the responsibility to address white supremacist myopia as endemic to white stories that claim to not be about whiteness--according to this disposition, nothing is ever about whiteness, because there is no about to about about.

Evie walks away from her near brush with serious criminality stunned by how easily she might have done violence. This, it seems, is the book's major revelation. But how much more powerful would it have been if it had contended with implicit white supremacist violence as well? Post-election hot takes scold that the left has been deaf to white working class pain, as if that pain isn't itself born of the colonized imagination. Thanks to its prominent erasure, "The Girls" ends up investing in a fantasy of white victimhood--the one in which it is possible to avert personal catastrophe and bear responsibility for nothing.]]> 3.48 2016 The Girls
author: Emma Cline
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/12/15
shelves:
review:
The audience for true crime narratives is disproportionately female and white, a fact some researchers have accounted for by claiming that women consume brutal stories to glean survival tips. The hosts of last summer's surprise hit podcast My Favorite Murder explain their fascination as a self-soothing anxiety response to being ground down by the constant threat of gendered violence. I don't totally buy it. I think the white female reader of true crime is actually interested in power--the more transgressive, the better. Savoring the gory details is a way of approaching the smelly heart of the thing that has been held out of reach for our whole lives. It's a soft psychology axiom that the most violent people are the most fearful, after all; it would only make sense to find some kinship or fascination for someone like me, like many women, who have struggled to metabolize a lot of fucking fear. But I also suspect that reading about cults/serial killers/rapists might be a way to sublimate race anxiety by investing in other kinds of violence, centering whiteness by centering its particular strain of fear.

Such fascinations are at the heart of this novel, in which 14-year-old Evie Boyd escapes her becalmed pre-boarding school summer by forging her way into a Manson-esque cult. Russell, the leader, is only nominally the object of her obsession, though; Suzanne, the group's dead-eyed, ride-or-die queen is the actual subject of Evie's infatuation, and everything Evie does that summer (including stealing from her mother's pocketbook and accepting assignations with Russell) is done to please or impress Suzanne. In fact, Evie sits out the novel's fictionalized version of the Cielo Drive murders only because Suzanne had dismissed her that night.

Evie lives with the knowledge that she would most likely have been a willing participant in those murders save for whatever quirk of Suzanne's mood that day spared her. The book makes the argument again and again that 1960s girlhood is about waiting for your social cues so you can produce the desired performance, and that people who yearn to be seen and accepted will do ugly acts to keep any love they find, making them a prey to manipulation.

"The Girls" is incredibly eloquent and voluble on gender, but completely disavows race, a staggering omission when you consider that Charles Manson's entire objective, in making bad pop songs and ordering celebrity murders alike, was to cause a race war. He wasn't just grooming women to join his ranks in order to satisfy his ego, enact sexual violence, or develop an audience for generic messianic ramblings. He was carrying out a white supremacist project in which the ultimate goal was white sovereignty. I know, I know, "The Girls" is fiction. But in a book otherwise so faithful to a widely recognized historical touchstone, what does it mean that race is the only major omission?

This year, lots of white writers of a certain generation or odiousness (ahem, Shriver) whined publicly that critiques of cultural appropriation basically amounted to thought-policing and that white writers can and should occupy any racial or cultural identity they wish to through their characters, for all writers are pro-truth, pro-human, blah blah blah blah! That is a disgusting white supremacist idea, and here's why: 1) It presumes a white tyranny over POC bodies, even and maybe especially imaginary ones 2) It presumes that the only way to write about race is by occupying POC bodies, implying that whiteness is not even a race but rather a default and also that white access to POC bodies is never to be questioned 3) It divests itself of the responsibility to address white supremacist myopia as endemic to white stories that claim to not be about whiteness--according to this disposition, nothing is ever about whiteness, because there is no about to about about.

Evie walks away from her near brush with serious criminality stunned by how easily she might have done violence. This, it seems, is the book's major revelation. But how much more powerful would it have been if it had contended with implicit white supremacist violence as well? Post-election hot takes scold that the left has been deaf to white working class pain, as if that pain isn't itself born of the colonized imagination. Thanks to its prominent erasure, "The Girls" ends up investing in a fantasy of white victimhood--the one in which it is possible to avert personal catastrophe and bear responsibility for nothing.
]]> The More They Disappear 26114177 The More They Disappear delivers everything a reader could want. On one hand a compelling literary thriller, on the other a deep and generous meditation on life in a small town torn by addiction, poverty, and corruption." --Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

When long-serving Kentucky sheriff Lew Mattock is murdered by a confused, drug-addicted teenager, chief deputy Harlan Dupee is tasked with solving the crime. But as Harlan soon discovers, his former boss wasn't exactly innocent.

The investigation throws Harlan headlong into the burgeoning OxyContin trade, from the slanted steps of trailer parks to the manicured porches of prominent citizens, from ATV trails and tobacco farms to riverboat casinos and country clubs.

As the evidence draws him closer to an unlikely suspect, Harlan comes to question whether the law can even right a wrong during the corrupt and violent years that followed the release of OxyContin.

The More They Disappear takes us to the front lines of the battle against small-town drug abuse in an unnerving tale of addiction, loss, and the battle to overcome the darkest parts of ourselves.]]> 320 Jesse Donaldson 1250050227 Sarah 5
"The More They Disappear" begins with the assassination of Marathon, Kentucky's Sheriff Mattocks and follows second-in-line Harlan Dupee's investigation, switching POV to check in on other town players: the deceased sheriff's son, who's pushed into running against Harlan for his father's vacant office, the town doctor and his son, the kid beauty pageant star who outgrew her parents' approval when she turned out to be a size 12 rather than a 4. The plot runs like a dream. I won't say more about it here, but it really chops the wood and carries the water.

Most of all, though, I want to praise the human observations evident in the dialogue, the lean little moments of attention that flare up and get it right, time after time after time. This book gets middle-of-nowhere hopelessness right. It gets withdrawal right. It gets the net of small-town gossip exactly right. What is it like to hate your body while you're wolfing down a fast food burger? This book gets it right. This isn't showy writing, exactly; the sentences unfold without gesturing to themselves or trying to wring some feeling out of the reader, which is noteworthy in a year where lots of the talked-about novels traded in sentence fragments and strove to gild each moment with a few worn tropes. It's tough to write a book like this. I think it requires the writer to put a lot of trust in the reader. I, for one, appreciate being trusted.

Especially right now, following an election where a lot of people voted out of fear and despair, going against their own interests and (please god) their best selves, stories like these are crucial because they make a connection between addiction as a private suffering and addiction as a public health issue and political force. Addiction, whether it's pills or booze or gambling, makes the world one-sided, and in a one-sided world, all kinds of desperate actions seem necessary and self-protective. Fear fed on itself makes it easy to screw everyone else and split. In a world run that way, the heroes are the ones who look with clear eyes and don't deceive themselves. Harlan Dupee is just such a man, and so is this author.]]> 3.69 2016 The More They Disappear
author: Jesse Donaldson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/12/03
date added: 2016/12/03
shelves:
review:
I love books that take seriously the parts of the country generally lambasted, scorned, and ignored (which makes sense, because I'm from one of these places). I also love books that get at the really bad underbelly of addiction--and I don't mean the seediness so much as the spiritual death articulated in deadened relationships and self-hatred. And I love a page-turner, especially one that delivers character depth and gorgeous writing along with the watertight plot. This book hits me where I live (in the best possible way).

"The More They Disappear" begins with the assassination of Marathon, Kentucky's Sheriff Mattocks and follows second-in-line Harlan Dupee's investigation, switching POV to check in on other town players: the deceased sheriff's son, who's pushed into running against Harlan for his father's vacant office, the town doctor and his son, the kid beauty pageant star who outgrew her parents' approval when she turned out to be a size 12 rather than a 4. The plot runs like a dream. I won't say more about it here, but it really chops the wood and carries the water.

Most of all, though, I want to praise the human observations evident in the dialogue, the lean little moments of attention that flare up and get it right, time after time after time. This book gets middle-of-nowhere hopelessness right. It gets withdrawal right. It gets the net of small-town gossip exactly right. What is it like to hate your body while you're wolfing down a fast food burger? This book gets it right. This isn't showy writing, exactly; the sentences unfold without gesturing to themselves or trying to wring some feeling out of the reader, which is noteworthy in a year where lots of the talked-about novels traded in sentence fragments and strove to gild each moment with a few worn tropes. It's tough to write a book like this. I think it requires the writer to put a lot of trust in the reader. I, for one, appreciate being trusted.

Especially right now, following an election where a lot of people voted out of fear and despair, going against their own interests and (please god) their best selves, stories like these are crucial because they make a connection between addiction as a private suffering and addiction as a public health issue and political force. Addiction, whether it's pills or booze or gambling, makes the world one-sided, and in a one-sided world, all kinds of desperate actions seem necessary and self-protective. Fear fed on itself makes it easy to screw everyone else and split. In a world run that way, the heroes are the ones who look with clear eyes and don't deceive themselves. Harlan Dupee is just such a man, and so is this author.
]]> Black Vodka: Ten Stories 16278218
In "Shining a Light," a woman's lost luggage is juxtaposed with far more serious losses. An icy woman seduces a broken man in "Vienna," and a man's empathy threatens to destroy him in "Stardust Nation." "Cave Girl" features a girl who wants to be a different kind of woman--she succeeds in a shocking way. A deformed man seeks beauty amid his angst in the title story.

These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humor and curiosity. Levy's stories will send you tumbling into a rabbit hole, and you won't be able to scramble out until long after you've turned the last page.]]> 125 Deborah Levy 1908276169 Sarah 4 3.53 2013 Black Vodka: Ten Stories
author: Deborah Levy
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2016/04/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Private Citizens 25817440 Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut�This Side of Paradise for a new era.

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts,ĚýPrivate CitizensĚýembraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. MiddlemarchĚýfor Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friendsĚýstagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.Ěý

A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.]]> 372 Tony Tulathimutte 0062399101 Sarah 5 3.39 2016 Private Citizens
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/03/19
date added: 2016/03/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics)]]> 143170
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 451 Donald Barthelme 0142437395 Sarah 5
By the way: collected works volumes are heartless, but they are economical. You may as well have it all in one place. Take your fucking vitamins.]]> 4.22 1981 Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics)
author: Donald Barthelme
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/01/01
shelves:
review:
Sometimes I feel like a huge misfit writing fiction. I have some language-level obsession that doesn't always translate very well into "shit happening," which, let's face it, is crucial to a story. I think I always put more elbow grease into sentences and images, and particular cadences that please me. All of which is my roundabout way of praising Don Barthelme for writing stories that hit the aforementioned balls out of the park. Take heart, poets attempting to write fiction. The stories in this book will show you some fantastic possibilities.

By the way: collected works volumes are heartless, but they are economical. You may as well have it all in one place. Take your fucking vitamins.
]]> The Flame Alphabet 11325011 Ěý
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents� sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.]]> 289 Ben Marcus 030737937X Sarah 4 2.88 2012 The Flame Alphabet
author: Ben Marcus
name: Sarah
average rating: 2.88
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/08/14
shelves:
review:

]]> How Should a Person Be? 9361377 The Middle Stories and Ticknor comes a bold interrogation into the possibility of a beautiful life. How Should a Person Be? is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the artist as a young woman � of two such artists, in fact.

For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux, a painter, and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which the blow job is the ultimate art form. She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself.

Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be? is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada's most fiercely original writer.]]> 306 Sheila Heti 0887842402 Sarah 3 3.35 2010 How Should a Person Be?
author: Sheila Heti
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2012/08/14
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 Sarah 4 3.66 1961 The Moviegoer
author: Walker Percy
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2012/07/23
date added: 2012/07/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Castle 333538 Translated and with a preface by Mark Harman

Left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power, previously unknown to English language readers.]]> 328 Franz Kafka 0805211063 Sarah 4
There comes a point in grad school � and I'm assuming this is true across most of the English-related disciplines in which classes resemble American Gladiator-style combat over sets of books � when you realize that the brightest person in the room makes their arguments not always based on personal conviction but rather on perversity. This isn't devil's advocacy, really, but an exercise in applying their rhetorical acumen to increasingly difficult topics in order to demonstrate control, because if it's pulled off, the stance has the added benefit of making everybody else seem wrong and dull while the interlocutor looks dazzling, able to make connections nobody else is even aware of seem obvious. I won't claim to having been the brightest person in the class, but I have been guilty of employing this technique. Trust me, it works, but it's not very satisfying. Doubt is a successful technique for thinking, but it becomes overwhelmingly sad (yes, I mean feelings-wise) to spray doubt onto everything you encounter just for the sake of attempting to control it. I could doubt that the previous reader of Waynesburg University's copy of The Castle caught any overtones of sardonic critique of massively powerful governance, or I could doubt my own automatic assumption that a religious reading of Kafka is bound to distort the book in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. One of these is more interesting � and more generous.

I mention all of this because rhetoric and apparent truthfulness are the object of nearly every interaction in The Castle. Doubt is the hellish and self-abnegating substance that makes for woe; it's possible to see K. and the others as subjects of exactly the kind of grad-school battle described above. The real question, for my money, is why they choose to stay in the village and endure it. If I were the one writing in the margins, I would have written "So just leave, then! Cripes!" as often as the ghost reader wrote "Night prayer! Aha!" during a fruitless ten-page-long discussion between K. and an undersecretary. Somehow, this makes a "god=the Castle" analogy a little more apt, if kind of radical for the educational institution this book was borrowed from. My final recommendation is that borrowed and with puzzling, theological side discourse is really the way, the only way to read this book. Two embattled thumbs up.]]> 3.97 1926 The Castle
author: Franz Kafka
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1926
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/07/23
shelves:
review:
If you're looking for aesthetic diversions while encamped at your parents' 250-acre rural farm for a summer of reading and writing before moving on to grad school for major leagues reading and writing activities, let me suggest dipping into the heavily annotated books at your local and increasingly religious small-town university for one hilarious joyride. Yes, writing in library books is tacky enough, but what if the marginalia attempts doggedly to make a case for the Castle, Kafka's emblem of hamstrung bureaucracy, as instead a manifestation of god, and all useless petitions to the Castle on behalf of K., the land-surveyor stymied by large-scale mismanagement, as unanswered but rapturous prayers? It's tempting to at first categorize this as a sadly limited scope for reading the work of a master, some problematic hiccup in the design of higher ed in the service of religious belief rather than some secular belief in knowledge, and maybe it's because I've read the book with this weird voice in my ear the whole time, but now I'm not certain that's the case. Or, most troubling of all, I can see a way for this note writer to make a good argument based on an analogy aligning the Castle with god as well as I can see a myopic and ultimately failed argument.

There comes a point in grad school � and I'm assuming this is true across most of the English-related disciplines in which classes resemble American Gladiator-style combat over sets of books � when you realize that the brightest person in the room makes their arguments not always based on personal conviction but rather on perversity. This isn't devil's advocacy, really, but an exercise in applying their rhetorical acumen to increasingly difficult topics in order to demonstrate control, because if it's pulled off, the stance has the added benefit of making everybody else seem wrong and dull while the interlocutor looks dazzling, able to make connections nobody else is even aware of seem obvious. I won't claim to having been the brightest person in the class, but I have been guilty of employing this technique. Trust me, it works, but it's not very satisfying. Doubt is a successful technique for thinking, but it becomes overwhelmingly sad (yes, I mean feelings-wise) to spray doubt onto everything you encounter just for the sake of attempting to control it. I could doubt that the previous reader of Waynesburg University's copy of The Castle caught any overtones of sardonic critique of massively powerful governance, or I could doubt my own automatic assumption that a religious reading of Kafka is bound to distort the book in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. One of these is more interesting � and more generous.

I mention all of this because rhetoric and apparent truthfulness are the object of nearly every interaction in The Castle. Doubt is the hellish and self-abnegating substance that makes for woe; it's possible to see K. and the others as subjects of exactly the kind of grad-school battle described above. The real question, for my money, is why they choose to stay in the village and endure it. If I were the one writing in the margins, I would have written "So just leave, then! Cripes!" as often as the ghost reader wrote "Night prayer! Aha!" during a fruitless ten-page-long discussion between K. and an undersecretary. Somehow, this makes a "god=the Castle" analogy a little more apt, if kind of radical for the educational institution this book was borrowed from. My final recommendation is that borrowed and with puzzling, theological side discourse is really the way, the only way to read this book. Two embattled thumbs up.
]]> Pale Fire 7805
Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.]]> 246 Vladimir Nabokov Sarah 5 4.17 1962 Pale Fire
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2012/07/16
date added: 2012/07/18
shelves:
review:
Shut up, stupid amazing prose stylist Russian person. And your little king, too.
]]> The Marriage Plot 10964693
As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy - suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.]]> 406 Jeffrey Eugenides 0374203059 Sarah 3 3.46 2011 The Marriage Plot
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2012/07/09
shelves:
review:

]]> The Broom of the System 6750 467 David Foster Wallace 0142002429 Sarah 3 3.84 1987 The Broom of the System
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/21
date added: 2011/11/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cuckoo (Yale Series of Younger Poets)]]> 1267405
The winner of the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus’s The Cuckoo , chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Glück. It is Glück’s first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Glück praises Streckfus’s art for its “nonsense and mystery,� its “mesmerizing beauty� and “luminous high-mindedness.”]]> 78 Peter Streckfus 0300102720 Sarah 3 3.97 2004 The Cuckoo (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
author: Peter Streckfus
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2011/08/24
shelves:
review:
I think I flipped through this a few years ago at a used bookstore in Pittsburgh and decided that it wasn't worth buying, and have been ignoring it ever since. Somehow I thought I knew what was up with this book based on that experience, but whatever, I was wrong. There's a point to the lyricism here, and I'm grateful for it because I'm not too inclined to enjoy pointlessly torqued language. Maybe pointless torque is impossible. Eh. Anyway.
]]> The Emperor's Children 3648 The New York Times Book Review) and "a literary intelligence far surpassing most other writers of her generation" (San Francisco Chronicle), The Emperor's Children is a dazzling, masterful novel about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way—and not—in New York City.

There is beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite—an "It" girl finishing her first book; the daughter of Murray Thwaite, celebrated intellectual and journalist—and her two closest friends from Brown, Danielle, a quietly appealing television producer, and Julius, a cash-strapped freelance critic. The delicious complications that arise among them become dangerous when Murray's nephew, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb, an idealistic college dropout determined to make his mark, comes to town. As the skies darken, it is Bootie's unexpected decisions—and their stunning, heartbreaking outcome—that will change each of their lives forever.

A richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune—of innocence and experience, seduction and self-invention; of ambition, including literary ambition; of glamour, disaster, and promise�The Emperor's Children is a tour de force that brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.]]> 431 Claire Messud 030726419X Sarah 2 2.96 2006 The Emperor's Children
author: Claire Messud
name: Sarah
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2011/08/24
shelves:
review:

]]> The Fermata 28220 The Fermata, which proves in the telling to be a very provocative, very funny and altogether morally confused piece of work.

Hilarious and totally original, Nicholson Baker's new novel is a triumphant comedy about sexual fantasy and fantastic sexuality.]]> 320 Nicholson Baker 0099466929 Sarah 4
Like many of Baker's other novels, "The Fermata" makes use of an unconventional narrative pace, but what could read as foppish or annoyingly smarmy is instead character-driven, and better yet, driven by a very intelligent, observant character. I guess that's the source of the charm, which is why I consider the outré turns "smutty" rather than "filthy" � because really, smut is a non-threatening grade of human vagary motivated by humility rather than gonzo boners (or at least it seems so to me).

I know others have voiced concerns about the book's lackadaisical morals regarding undressing and examining women who are frozen in time, and if my grad school punch-card hasn't already been revoked, saying that I find those moral quandaries to be ultimately less than crucial here would certainly do the trick. Still, I think the problem most germane to this kind of story isn't what a man does with the power to stop time but how he rationalizes its presence in his life. Arno is a terminal temp, living comfortably but without the garnishes we usually expect to accompany a nearly middle-aged life, but more crucially, he is alienated by the skill he can't share and the attitudes it grants him. Though these particular details are fantastical, in practice they really aren't so different from how so many of us (or myself, anyway) approach adulthood.

And yet, and yet. Such an elegant metaphor could turn nihilistic. The story takes a fairly conventional romantic narrative arc in its last act, one that's reaffirming but not wholly convincing. I found it a little rushed and dissatisfying, but I was still glad Baker didn't turn this effervescent novel into a time-altering update of "The Trial."

]]> 3.67 1994 The Fermata
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2011/04/15
date added: 2011/08/23
shelves:
review:
This book is so smutty that I should have thought better of reading it at work on a slow day. Some passages � especially those in which Arno, the protagonist, freezes time so he can write a dirty story tailored to one momentary subject of his infatuation or another and hide it within reach so that she will find it when he unfreezes time � test the limits of what one could consider public reading material. The rest of the book considers Arno's unusual abilities from a charmed philosophical distance, but there's no doubt that when this book gets dirty it gets real durty.

Like many of Baker's other novels, "The Fermata" makes use of an unconventional narrative pace, but what could read as foppish or annoyingly smarmy is instead character-driven, and better yet, driven by a very intelligent, observant character. I guess that's the source of the charm, which is why I consider the outré turns "smutty" rather than "filthy" � because really, smut is a non-threatening grade of human vagary motivated by humility rather than gonzo boners (or at least it seems so to me).

I know others have voiced concerns about the book's lackadaisical morals regarding undressing and examining women who are frozen in time, and if my grad school punch-card hasn't already been revoked, saying that I find those moral quandaries to be ultimately less than crucial here would certainly do the trick. Still, I think the problem most germane to this kind of story isn't what a man does with the power to stop time but how he rationalizes its presence in his life. Arno is a terminal temp, living comfortably but without the garnishes we usually expect to accompany a nearly middle-aged life, but more crucially, he is alienated by the skill he can't share and the attitudes it grants him. Though these particular details are fantastical, in practice they really aren't so different from how so many of us (or myself, anyway) approach adulthood.

And yet, and yet. Such an elegant metaphor could turn nihilistic. The story takes a fairly conventional romantic narrative arc in its last act, one that's reaffirming but not wholly convincing. I found it a little rushed and dissatisfying, but I was still glad Baker didn't turn this effervescent novel into a time-altering update of "The Trial."


]]> <![CDATA[Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (Aesthetics Today)]]> 30536 180 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe 1581150377 Sarah 3 3.62 1999 Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (Aesthetics Today)
author: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2009/02/01
date added: 2011/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Collected Poems 111879 Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.

This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.]]> 218 Philip Larkin 0374529205 Sarah 5 4.21 1988 Collected Poems
author: Philip Larkin
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Awe 1455807 73 Dorothea Lasky 1933517247 Sarah 5 4.03 2007 Awe
author: Dorothea Lasky
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)]]> 256008 Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.]]> 960 Larry McMurtry 067168390X Sarah 0 to-read 4.54 1985 Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/04/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Love in the Ruins 60403 416 Walker Percy 0312243111 Sarah 0 to-read 3.84 1971 Love in the Ruins
author: Walker Percy
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2011/04/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> I Looked Alive: Stories 384080 188 Garielle Lutz 0971248575 Sarah 4 4.16 2004 I Looked Alive: Stories
author: Garielle Lutz
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/04/18
shelves:
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]]> Being Dead 92559
"Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell--just look at them--that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

From that moment forward, Being Dead becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death.]]> 196 Jim Crace 0312275420 Sarah 4 3.72 1999 Being Dead
author: Jim Crace
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2010/07/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings]]> 792712
A master of formally inventive poetry and what today would be called micro-fiction, Kharms built off the legacy of Russian Futurist writers to create a uniquely deadpan style written out of and in spite of the absurdities of life in Stalinist Russia. Featuring the acclaimed novella The Old Woman and darkly humorous short prose sequence Events (Sluchai), Today I Wrote Nothing also includes dozens of short prose pieces, plays, and poems long admired in Russia, but never before available in English. A major contribution for American readers and students of Russian literature and an exciting discovery for fans of contemporary writers as eclectic as George Saunders, John Ashbery, and Martin McDonagh, Today I Wrote Nothing is an invaluable collection for readers of innovative writing everywhere.

About the Editor


MATVEI YANKELEVICH is also a co-translator of Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (2006). His translation of the Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "Cloud in Pants" appears in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky. He is the author of a long poem, The Present Work, and his writing has appeared in Fence, Open City, and many other literary journals. He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in New York City and edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Press in Brooklyn.]]> 287 Daniil Kharms 1585677434 Sarah 3 4.30 2007 Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings
author: Daniil Kharms
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2010/04/27
date added: 2010/04/27
shelves:
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]]> 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 Sarah 4 3.29 2010 The Ask
author: Sam Lipsyte
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2010/04/27
date added: 2010/04/27
shelves:
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]]> The Great Fires 142978
The "far, stubborn, disastrous" course of Jack Gilbert's resolute journey--not one that would promise in time to bring him home to the consolations of Penelope and the comforts of Ithaca but one that would instead take him ever outward to the impossible blankness of the desert--could never have been achieved in the society of others. What has kept this great poet brave has been the difficult company of his poems--and now we have, in Gilbert's third and most silent book, what may be, what must be, the bravest of these imperial accomplishments.

Ěý]]> 96 Jack Gilbert 0679747672 Sarah 5 DAMN. 4.33 1994 The Great Fires
author: Jack Gilbert
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2010/02/01
date added: 2010/03/14
shelves:
review:
DAMN.
]]> The First Four Books of Poems 822108 240 Louise GlĂĽck 0880014776 Sarah 5 4.15 1990 The First Four Books of Poems
author: Louise GlĂĽck
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2010/01/27
shelves:
review:

]]> The Difficult Farm 6923043
This is serious. Heather Christle’s poems in The Difficult Farm are dancing with the mysteries surrounding our condition and enlivening our language in the process. Christle’s poems are magical but they’re too busy to tell you that. These poems run and jump and float over an ever-evolving landscape where what’s at work is the serious business of discovery. In this book you will make discoveries of all kinds. These poems will shoot you to the moon, but which moon? � James Tate
]]> 77 Heather Christle 0980193834 Sarah 3 4.27 2009 The Difficult Farm
author: Heather Christle
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/01/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[It Is Daylight (Yale Series of Younger Poets)]]> 5294568
Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.ĚýMesmerizing and electric,Ěýher poems seem to be articulatedĚýin the privacy of an enclosed space.ĚýThe poems are concrete and yet metaphysically challenging, both witty and despairing. Collinsâ€� emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail.ĚýIn her Foreword, contest judge Louise GlĂĽck observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.â€� GlĂĽck calls Collinsâ€� volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”]]> 112 Arda Collins 0300148887 Sarah 4 4.00 2009 It Is Daylight (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
author: Arda Collins
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2010/01/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z]]> 209681
In this hypnotic and piercingly intelligent chronicle, Ann Marlowe dissects her former heroin habit, and recounts in harrowing detail the rigors and realities of life under the influence while building a successful Wall Street career and establishing a reputation as a critic in the alternative press. A one-time Harvard grad student in philosophy, Marlowe ruthlessly examines the paradoxical nature of addiction, and connects her own experience to a wider discussion of heroin in the context of our post-consumer, digital society.]]> 320 Ann Marlowe 0385720165 Sarah 3 3.64 1999 How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z
author: Ann Marlowe
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/01/24
shelves:
review:
I first read this book in high school--I bought it at St. Mark's Bookshop during a Thanksgiving in New York with my parents during which we had the traditional meal at a diner in Hell's Kitchen populated on that day only by cab drivers. I had, I think, blintzes. Anyway, the genre of drug memoir is a strict one, very prescriptive in terms of how repentant the addict should be, how low rock bottom ought to be, and how glowingly self-righteous the emerged new soul will sound in the retelling. Ann Marlowe is strident in her abandonment of those tropes, choosing instead to chart her memoir through alphabetically organized vignettes, some philosophical and others heartlessly concrete. The approach may sound played by now--the book came out about ten years ago, after all, way before the tidal wave of memoirs and the "lyric essay"--but I can promise that it's weirdly suited to a woman holding a Harvard MA in Philosophy who wants to revisit the particularities of heroin addiction. I take a hard line on memoirs, especially those that mine perennially juicy topics, but I guarantee that this drug memoir is on a different order. Even on re-reading, and with a wholly different level of fascination with urban drug narratives.
]]> The Oblivion Ha-Ha 709814 Book by Tate, James 92 James Tate 0887482155 Sarah 3 4.12 1931 The Oblivion Ha-Ha
author: James Tate
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1931
rating: 3
read at: 2010/01/20
date added: 2010/01/20
shelves:
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]]> Then Came the Evening 6904961 A riveting, psychologically rich family drama set in the American West, from a writer who has been compared to Cormac McCarthy.

Bandy Dorner, home fromĚýVietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding on the road.

Eighteen years later, Bandy is released from prison. His parents are gone, but on the derelict family ranch, Bandy faces a different reunion. Tracy, his now teenaged son, has come to claim the father he’s never known. Iona, Bandy’s ex-wife, has returned on the heels of her son. All three are damaged, hardened, haunted. But warily, desperately, they move in a slow dance around each other, trying to piece back together a family that never was; trying to discover if they belong together at all.

With unflinching honesty and restrained beauty, Brian Hart explores the possibilities and limitations of his characters as they struggle toward a shared future. Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw I daho landscape, Then Came the Evening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex—a stunning debut.]]> 272 Brian Hart 1608190145 Sarah 5 3.43 2009 Then Came the Evening
author: Brian Hart
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2010/01/20
date added: 2010/01/20
shelves:
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]]> Valley of the Dolls 581811 448 Jacqueline Susann 0802135196 Sarah 4 3.96 1966 Valley of the Dolls
author: Jacqueline Susann
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2007/11/25
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
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Okay, spare me your wrath. Jacqueline Susann fascinates me because she's undeniably pulpy (and that should be enough) but I feel guilty with more weighty/legitimized books on my to-read list. (Proust, I'm looking at you.) But I also love books that have that full-on narrative power to take over your entire afternoon, and Valley of the Dolls has it in aces. If you've ever wanted to read People magazine for eight hours straight, you're going to go crazy for this.
]]> <![CDATA[Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry]]> 3998688
Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense provokes readers into the elliptical worlds of Rae Armantrout, Paul Muldoon, C. D. Wright, and other contemporary poets whose complexities make them challenging, original, and, finally, readable. Burt's intelligence and enthusiasm introduce both tentative and longtime poetry readers to the rewards of reading new poetry. As Burt writes in the title essay: "The poets I know don't want to be famous people half so much as they want their best poems read; I want to help you find and read them. I write here for people who want to read more new poetry but somehow never get around to it; for people who enjoy Seamus Heaney or Elizabeth Bishop and want to know what next; for people who enjoy John Ashbery or Anne Carson but aren't sure why; and, especially, for people who read the half-column poems in glossy magazines and ask, â€Is that all there is?'"]]> 360 Stephen Burt 1555975216 Sarah 4 4.06 2009 Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
author: Stephen Burt
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/11/03
shelves:
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]]> Lilies Without 1304602 80 Laura Kasischke 1931337365 Sarah 4 3.99 2007 Lilies Without
author: Laura Kasischke
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/10/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Remainland: Selected Poems 1323458 112 Aase Berg 0976569205 Sarah 3 4.37 2005 Remainland: Selected Poems
author: Aase Berg
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/10/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Siste Viator 91010 63 Sarah Manguso 1884800696 Sarah 3 3.89 2006 Siste Viator
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/10/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Modern Life 356529 Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world. Her prose pieces and lyrics examine the divided, halved self in poems about centaurs, ship figureheads, and a robot boy. Throughout, Harvey's signature wit and concision show us the double-sided nature of reality, of what we see and what we know.]]> 80 Matthea Harvey 1555974805 Sarah 2 4.01 2007 Modern Life
author: Matthea Harvey
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2009/10/05
shelves:
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]]> The People of Paper 43603 256 Salvador Plascencia 0156032112 Sarah 4 4.06 2005 The People of Paper
author: Salvador Plascencia
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/09/15
shelves:
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]]> The Sabotage Cafe 1134535

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 253 Joshua Furst 0375414320 Sarah 2 3.14 2007 The Sabotage Cafe
author: Joshua Furst
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2009/08/28
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]]> The Art of Eating 94079
Includes five of her most popular works:
Serve It Forth (1937)
Consider the Oyster (1941)
How to Cook a Wolf (1942)
The Gastronomical Me (1943)
An Alphabet of Gourmets (1949) ]]> 749 M.F.K. Fisher 0764542613 Sarah 5 4.32 1954 The Art of Eating
author: M.F.K. Fisher
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/08/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Complex Sleep (Kuhl House Poets)]]> 375893 Complex Sleep, Tony Tost's ambitious second book of poems, leaps upward with an astounding multiplicity of voices, utterances, and bursts. Each leap marks a sure and precise entry into a world of images, ideas, and sensations that is brand new - the true accomplishment of any poetic work. audacious in scope, swiping at meaning via language as fragmented music. Tost takes on the problem of physical shape, reorchestrates phrases according to the alphabet, and writes himself into the hypnagogic state between waking and dreaming. Informed by their own procedural constraints, these poems invent forms that tap the unconscious poetic, the very complexity embodied in sleep. All the while, Tost reforms utterance beyond the mere epistemology of much contemporary poetry. discovering the what, Complex Sleep is about discovering how to say what needs to be said. Skip the opera, this book performs.]]> 122 Tony Tost 1587296217 Sarah 1 4.06 2007 Complex Sleep (Kuhl House Poets)
author: Tony Tost
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2007
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2009/08/16
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[No One Belongs Here More Than You]]> 113429 205 Miranda July 0743299396 Sarah 3 3.83 2007 No One Belongs Here More Than You
author: Miranda July
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2009/08/16
date added: 2009/08/16
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Nazi Literature in the Americas]]> 1178230 Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño’s books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers� works, plus an epilogue (“for Monsters�), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).]]> 227 Roberto Bolaño 0811217051 Sarah 4
I wish I could tell you what that reason is. Really. I want to know myself. The typical metafictional/poststructural techniques are side-stepped by a graceful and cold journalistic style, one that manages not to judge a cultural class which is summarily judged so often, and with so little risk of offending even the most hawkish among us, that "knee-jerk" doesn't even begin to describe the response while also avoiding any scent of sympathy.

I know this review doesn't present the book as a thrilling read, but you're going to have to trust me I suppose, but if you haven't read Bolano (or aren't a jealous writer anxious to crib his skills) this might not be the place to start. But otherwise, call me right now so you can borrow my copy.]]> 3.93 1996 Nazi Literature in the Americas
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2009/06/11
date added: 2009/07/01
shelves:
review:
This book has absolutely no right to be as good and readable as it is. Like most books that I like a lot, it also makes me slightly angry. The conceit: the book purports to be a kind of encyclopedia listing North and South American writers with exceedingly conservative ideals, detailing their autobiographies and bibliographies in a suitably dry encyclopedic style. In most hands, this conceit would hardly get two specks more interesting than my brief description, or flirt with creepy speculative visions of the world in which so many arch conservative writers are permitted to flourish, or damn them all as criminals, or hinge on some revisionist historical intrigue. It does none of those things, somehow. Those who have read "2666" will recognize some stylistic similarities between this book and section four of 2666 in which Bolano drily reports the deaths of hundreds of women in a Mexican border town modeled on Ciudad Juarez, and "Nazi Literature in the Americas" succeeds in the same way as that section succeeds within the larger setting of the novel.

I wish I could tell you what that reason is. Really. I want to know myself. The typical metafictional/poststructural techniques are side-stepped by a graceful and cold journalistic style, one that manages not to judge a cultural class which is summarily judged so often, and with so little risk of offending even the most hawkish among us, that "knee-jerk" doesn't even begin to describe the response while also avoiding any scent of sympathy.

I know this review doesn't present the book as a thrilling read, but you're going to have to trust me I suppose, but if you haven't read Bolano (or aren't a jealous writer anxious to crib his skills) this might not be the place to start. But otherwise, call me right now so you can borrow my copy.
]]> <![CDATA[Drugs are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir]]> 155529 272 Lisa Crystal Carver 1932360948 Sarah 4
Of course, no memoir gets published without one of those classic hard knocks arcs, and the arc here follows Lisa's abusive relationship with a manipulative and dangerous man much like her father, and her ability to get away once she could clearly see the effect her awful and wonderful father had on her relationships. That right there, that's the reason I'm tempted to class this as a beach read version of the other side of growing up Gen X, but wait, fuck that. This is Lisa Suckdog we're talking about here, who did an entire album of weirdo songs threatening GG Allin. GG ALLIN, okay? ]]> 3.99 2005 Drugs are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir
author: Lisa Crystal Carver
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2009/06/30
date added: 2009/07/01
shelves:
review:
I'm going to suppress my desire to denigrate this as a fluffy memoirish ladytimes summer read, because while that's a tempting angle to take, it's not really fair. Lisa Crystal Carver is one of the proto-zinesters who made amazing and kind of solipsistic small-run self-obsessed photocopied magazines, back even before riot grrrl was really a thing or Sassy started covering the phenomenon. I was mostly into reading this because I treasure my compilation of her zine Rollerderby and I was curious to see how she would make the leap from the informalities of old school cut and paste to the officialdom of bookness. In her zines, Lisa Crystal Carver has this magic ability to write off-handedly about gross stuff (swallowing phlegm balls, her vagaries as Lisa Suckdog in the eponymous band/performance thing known as Suckdog, which often involved crude props and simulated scatplay on stage to accompany operatic music about lost kittens and stuff) and some feminist stuff (don't get scared away, though, this was before the towering pain in the ass of third wave Sex 'n the City feminism flamed up and out). It's surprising, somehow, that even with such saucy material to play off of, her best writing conquers the mundane (interviews with trashy cracker neighbors, reviews of her cats, hating on Linda Evangalista's new-at-the-time blond haircut). Gladly, gladly, a lot of the things I loved about Rollerderby are preserved in "Drugs Are Nice," but shown from backstage, with a more reflective look at the reasons feral teenage Lisa was so good, so bad, so slutty, so honest. And okay, the transition between zine and grownup nonfiction narrative is a little awkward at times. One gets the sense that she hadn't completely resolved her authorial position, whether to write from the present looking back at the past or to deliver it all immediacy-style with second person present tense, which annoyed me in the first few chapters but smoothed out eventually.

Of course, no memoir gets published without one of those classic hard knocks arcs, and the arc here follows Lisa's abusive relationship with a manipulative and dangerous man much like her father, and her ability to get away once she could clearly see the effect her awful and wonderful father had on her relationships. That right there, that's the reason I'm tempted to class this as a beach read version of the other side of growing up Gen X, but wait, fuck that. This is Lisa Suckdog we're talking about here, who did an entire album of weirdo songs threatening GG Allin. GG ALLIN, okay?
]]> Consider the Oyster 132280 96 M.F.K. Fisher 0865473358 Sarah 4 4.20 1941 Consider the Oyster
author: M.F.K. Fisher
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1941
rating: 4
read at: 2009/07/01
date added: 2009/07/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Take It 6130398 Slope

“Through repetition, rhythm, and a pervasively taut but accessible voice, Beckman sweeps us through his poems.”�Rain Taxi

One of poetry’s genuinely necessary voices, Joshua Beckman offers a magnanimous vision of the poetic and social landscape, masterfully combining traditional and contemporary concerns and speech patterns in attending to a degraded, yet wondrous world. Take It is a gift of profound generosity.

I feel now like I am saying sorry for something, when
what I am saying here is that the unknowing spirit is
greater than the knowing spirit, that no matter what
emboldened structure descends to stand before you
in its plan and fullness, you do not know what it is.

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of Shake (Wave Books, 2006), multiple collections of collaborative work, and numerous translations. He lives in both Brooklyn and Seattle.


]]> 88 Joshua Beckman 1933517379 Sarah 5 4.20 2009 Take It
author: Joshua Beckman
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2009/03/24
date added: 2009/05/28
shelves:
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This book is so good it makes me a little angry. Oh no.
]]> Ooga-Booga: Poems 804491 rage, and desire.


Here I am, not a practical man,
But clear-eyed in my contact lenses,
Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others,
Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,
Despairing of art and of life,
Seeking protection from death by seeking it
On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels . . .
--from "The Death of the Shah"

The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review ).]]> 112 Frederick Seidel 0374226555 Sarah 4 4.00 2006 Ooga-Booga: Poems
author: Frederick Seidel
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2009/05/26
date added: 2009/05/28
shelves:
review:
You know how sometimes when you first start reading a book it doesn't really connect, and then some small attitudinal shift occurs (probably in you, but I'll reserve the possibility that an attitudinal shift could occur in the book itself), after which it rises out of obscurity and becomes a favorite thing? I love it when that happens. That happened to me last night reading Ooga-Booga. Before, I would flip through and read a little and random, finding it simultaneously flat and precious. But the opening poem in the book (which I had previously neglected) sets up all of the aesthetic landmarks that make the later poems snap into focus: a certain debonair stance, lip service paid to prosody but in an ultimately unruly way, something about the tempo of the line, and these lines do hold to a tempo--that might be the most amazing thing about Seidel, that he creates a ubiquitous tempo throughout the poems, in the background, like a clock in the next room over. If your ear doesn't pick up on it, these poems are going to strike you as too mannerly, whatever that means, instead of funny and kind of dark. OH EXCITEMENT, to read something that feels so new.
]]> Quaker Guns 2730871 they’re flotsam, jetsam, or any old trees, ships� logs.
They’re broken masts. They’re the Friends of the Friends. Caroline Knox is the winner of the 2005 Maurice English Award and the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement , The Paris Review , and elsewhere.]]> 70 Caroline Knox 1933517271 Sarah 2 3.04 2008 Quaker Guns
author: Caroline Knox
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2009/05/27
date added: 2009/05/28
shelves:
review:
Hmm. There's a lot to like here, but there's also a pretty thick patina of self-conscious textuality. It reminds me a bit of Dorothea Lasky's most recent ("Awe," also from Wave) but with a more composed stature. Does that make any sense? Do any of the words for describing poetry make sense? Okay.
]]> Blindness 2526 No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.

Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.

A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.
It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.

This is not anarchy, this is blindness.

â€Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yetâ€� Independent]]> 326 JosĂ© Saramago Sarah 3 4.04 1995 Blindness
author: José Saramago
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2009/05/21
date added: 2009/05/22
shelves:
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]]> 2666 63032 1128 Roberto Bolaño 843396867X Sarah 5 4.22 2004 2666
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2009/05/01
date added: 2009/05/22
shelves:
review:
It might be too soon to say, but I think 2666 is going to be one of my favorite books of all time. I just finished it yesterday and still have to think about it some, but it's really that good. Do it. Don't even finish reading this.
]]> Selected Poems 150221 Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath through the triumphs of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to the brilliance of A Wave - each collection of John Ashbery's verse has broken new ground. Now, from the whole range of a lifetime's work, Ashbery has chosen his own selection of 138 poems, including short lyrics, haiku, prose poems, and many of his major long poems. Seeing these great works together in one volume, readers will be able to savor a distillation of John Ashbery's work and appreciate fully how remarkable is his achievement.]]> 368 John Ashbery 0140585532 Sarah 3 4.20 1967 Selected Poems
author: John Ashbery
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/02/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Primitive Mentor (Pitt Poetry Series)]]> 2338783 80 Dean Young 0822959917 Sarah 4 4.14 2008 Primitive Mentor (Pitt Poetry Series)
author: Dean Young
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/02/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience]]> 838589
Tracing its beginnings to the nineteenth century--when industrialization transformed nature into an artificial kingdom of miniature scale--Olalquiaga describes the at once exhilarated and melancholic atmosphere where kitsch came to life. In an arresting mix of theory and anecdote, she examines objects from both the past and the present, probing the fluid boundaries between reality and fantasy, and finding in kitsch a phenomenon as relevant to our own time as it was to the era that made it a massive experience.]]> 321 Celeste Olalquiaga 0679433937 Sarah 3 3.95 1998 The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience
author: Celeste Olalquiaga
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2009/02/01
date added: 2009/02/01
shelves:
review:
It's kind of embarrassing, how much I would have adored this book if I read it during my undergrad theory nerd phase. The bite-sized summary is that kitsch, in its trapped-in-Lucite glory, is an approximation of the natural world which we've destroyed through rapid industrialization, a sentimental distortion of our relationship to nature. That idea is probably worth the price of the ticket. Also, I like the historical picture of kitsch evolving from Victorian aquarium-keeping to present. That said, the introduction is a regrettably over-written fantasia. But there are pictures, so bonus for that.
]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture (D.A.P./ICONOCLA)]]> 102907 288 Aaron Rose 1933045302 Sarah 0 4.09 2004 Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture (D.A.P./ICONOCLA)
author: Aaron Rose
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2009/02/01
date added: 2009/02/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Bushwhacked Piano 92196 Imagine:

(1) A bona-fide American freak tooling across country in a green Hudson Hornet hotly pursuing (2) a darling little millionairess who thirsts for "real experience" (3) teamed up with a double amputee, the world's fastest talking con man with a scheme to build bat towers for day-glo bats that can rid any area of insects "practically overnight." And you'll understand why The Bushwhacked Piano has been acclaimed from reviewer to reviewer!]]> 228 Thomas Mc Guane 0394726421 Sarah 0 3.73 1971 The Bushwhacked Piano
author: Thomas Mc Guane
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/08/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Famous Americans (Yale Series of Younger Poets)]]> 409458 Famous Americans takes the reader on a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture. Employing a variety of forms (from epistolary to script to interview and beyond), this work proves to be as much about exploring frameworks as it is about examining the lives of famous and not-so-famous Americans. Goodman questions our concept of what it means to be an icon: he disrupts our assumptions, creating an alternate universe in which nothing remains sacred.
]]> 96 Loren Goodman 0300100035 Sarah 3 3.89 2003 Famous Americans (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
author: Loren Goodman
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/07/14
shelves:
review:
I was really psyched about the Don Rickles poem and the yeast poem, too, but as a book this feels more like a lot of jokey poem ideas. Kind of like, "oh, wouldn't it be funny to write a whole poem based on the ambiguity of this one phrase?" repeated for an entire manuscript. Which makes it fun to read but a little slender generally.
]]> So Midwest 1923178 so midwest is a zine about a gender queer cashier/grocery bagger/survivor who deals with annoying customers, often drinks too much, used to tour in a punk band, occasionally makes out, and by far this cashier is the best dancer in the entire universe. word.

Also check

]]> 238 Luran Barry Sarah 5 4.59 2006 So Midwest
author: Luran Barry
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/07/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Search Party: Collected Poems 574397 336 William Matthews 061856585X Sarah 3 4.28 1982 Search Party: Collected Poems
author: William Matthews
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2008/07/09
date added: 2008/07/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities]]> 489230
"did I mention my first kiss was extracted
by someone who never should have been that
lucky?" - From "Keep Some Stuff for Yourself"]]> 144 Olena Kalytiak Davis 1582343527 Sarah 0 3.95 2003 Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities
author: Olena Kalytiak Davis
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2008/07/09
date added: 2008/07/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Ornithologies 666854 108 Joshua Poteat 0938078909 Sarah 3 4.53 2006 Ornithologies
author: Joshua Poteat
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2008/07/09
date added: 2008/07/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Black Freckles: Stories 427701 102 Larry Levis 0879054565 Sarah 0 3.80 1992 Black Freckles: Stories
author: Larry Levis
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at: 2008/07/09
date added: 2008/07/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross]]> 256137 96 Mark Yakich 0142004510 Sarah 3 3.86 2004 Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross
author: Mark Yakich
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/06/17
shelves:
review:
There's some undeniable moxy here, which is alarming, because I dislike the word "moxy" and yet have no accurate replacement to describe this book. Maybe it's a surfeit of moxy that holds me back from totally liking this, but I wish it were a little more rude. It's full of concept poems--you know, where the conceit of the poem constitutes 75% or more of the poem's intrigue. But the problem with concept poems is that it's pretty difficult to write something that lives up to the possibility generated by the framing idea, leaving readers like me a little cranky.
]]> <![CDATA[Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme]]> 179560 Not-Knowing amounts to the posthumous manifesto of one of our premier literary modernists. Here are Barthelme's thoughts on writing (his own and others); his observations on art, architecture, film, and city life; interviews, including two never previously published; and meditations on everything from Superman III to the art of rendering "Melancholy Baby" on jazz banjolele. This is a rich and eclectic selection of work by the man Robert Coover has called "one of the great citizens of contemporary world letters."ĚýĚý]]> 352 Donald Barthelme 0679741208 Sarah 4 4.07 1983 Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
author: Donald Barthelme
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/10
shelves:
review:

]]> An Alphabet for Gourmets 764387 213 M.F.K. Fisher 0865473919 Sarah 4 4.17 1949 An Alphabet for Gourmets
author: M.F.K. Fisher
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[His Dark Materials (His Dark Materials, #1-3)]]> 45486 Philip Pullman's complete
His Dark Materials trilogy�
now in one grand volume

The Golden Compass � The Subtle Knife � The Amber Spyglass

Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, changed the face of fantasy publishing with its stunning originality. The complete trilogy went on to become a bestseller in dozens of countries around the world, critically acclaimed and showered with prizes. Together, these novels�The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—are renowned for their beautiful storytelling, epic scope, and dearly loved characters.

Captivating children and adults alike, it is a tale born of witch clans and armored bears, shining angels and magical devices, haunted otherworlds and the shocking destinies of Lyra and Will, two children at the center of a more-than-mortal battle. This edition presents Philip Pullman's entire His Dark Materials trilogy in a single volume—a celebration of this astonishing work, now a beloved classic.]]> 933 Philip Pullman 0375847227 Sarah 4 4.19 2000 His Dark Materials (His Dark Materials, #1-3)
author: Philip Pullman
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2007/12/29
shelves:
review:
It was my great scheme to buy a cheap paperback copy of The Golden Compass to read during my three hour layover in Houston, you know, for diversion. But it got me. It got me so hard that I left the first copy at home for my parents to read and bought the bigass doorstopper omnibus version today for my three hour layover in Atlanta. (Which was pretty painless given their plentiful smoking lounges, but I digress.) Of course, I had it on some good authority that these books were pretty good, but I was way more into them than I expected to be. The only reason I'm giving this four stars right now is because I haven't finished all three. Because after that, it's probably going to be a five-star, yeah.
]]> The Lichtenberg Figures 128399

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures� are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.

Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility.

Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

]]> 53 Ben Lerner 1556592116 Sarah 0 4.12 2004 The Lichtenberg Figures
author: Ben Lerner
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2007/12/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Angle of Yaw 128398 In his bold second book, Ben Lerner molds philosophical insight, political outrage, and personal experience into a devastating critique of mass society. Angle of Yaw investigates the fate of public space, public speech, and how the technologies of viewing—aerial photography in particular—feed our culture an image of itself. And it’s a spectacular view.


The man observes the action on the field with the tiny television he brought to the stadium. He is topless, painted gold, bewigged. His exaggerated foam index finger indicates the giant screen upon which his own image is now displayed, a model of fanaticism. He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV. He suddenly stands with arms upraised and initiates the wave that will consume him.


Haunted by our current “war on terror,� much of the book was written while Lerner was living in Madrid (at the time of the Atocha bombings and their political aftermath), as the author steeped himself in the history of Franco and fascism. Regardless of when or where it was written, Angle of Yaw will further establish Ben Lerner as one of our most intriguing and least predictable poets.


]]> 127 Ben Lerner 1556592469 Sarah 0 4.12 2006 Angle of Yaw
author: Ben Lerner
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2007/12/14
date added: 2007/12/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Design with X (Wesleyan New Poets)]]> 529061 64 Dean Young 0819511552 Sarah 0 4.13 1988 Design with X (Wesleyan New Poets)
author: Dean Young
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at: 2007/12/14
date added: 2007/12/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Radio On: A Listener's Diary 12359
As a series of impressions and reflections regarding contemporary American culture, and as an extended meditation on both our media and our society, this keenly focused book is as insightful as it is refreshing.

Throughout Radio On, "Vowell's touch is about as delicate as Teddy Kennedy's after a pitcher of martinis" (Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times).]]> 256 Sarah Vowell 0312183011 Sarah 3
But Vowell is one of those essayists I read for company. I'm interested in what she has to say about pretty much anything--Hank Williams, the big-scale stupidity of a rock and roll hall of fame in a clinically modern I.M. Pei facade, the slickity-doo-da of corporate radio. I was 11 in 1994, and while I didn't yet have all my critical tools in place, it was kind of my first year to participate in culture-at-large, or at least the first year I felt that way, and this book is a time capsule with all of the names and noteworthies, some so small and almost charming in the current context.
]]> 3.44 1996 Radio On: A Listener's Diary
author: Sarah Vowell
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2007/12/03
shelves:
review:
When I saw Sarah Vowell read in Pittsburgh a few years ago, somebody asked her during the Q&A about this book, and she made disparaging comments. She said it was unfocused and vitriolic and kind of cringe-inducing. Essentially, it's a diary of every little bit of radio Vowell listened to in 1994--the heady times of Rush Limbaugh and "the Republican Revolution" and O.J. and Newt. And Kurt and Courtney. I guess Rush Limbaugh had incited this new wave of radio listening through his shit-mongering, and Vowell's panic is palpable at every turn. Hindsight being what it is, her alarm seems kind of quaint. To say the least.

But Vowell is one of those essayists I read for company. I'm interested in what she has to say about pretty much anything--Hank Williams, the big-scale stupidity of a rock and roll hall of fame in a clinically modern I.M. Pei facade, the slickity-doo-da of corporate radio. I was 11 in 1994, and while I didn't yet have all my critical tools in place, it was kind of my first year to participate in culture-at-large, or at least the first year I felt that way, and this book is a time capsule with all of the names and noteworthies, some so small and almost charming in the current context.

]]> Housekeeping 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Sarah 5 3.82 1980 Housekeeping
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2007/11/25
shelves:
review:
It is my extremely cranky tendency to ignore good books for a long time if I feel that their instant canonization has been unwarranted by actual quality of said book. Often I'm completely wrong, and such is the case here. I can't really remember why I reserved so much snark for this novel because it's really wonderful, pretty astonishing, and always on point in its prose. I feel better about novels after reading this book--no seriously.
]]> <![CDATA[The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire]]> 224579 272 Wayne Koestenbaum 0306810085 Sarah 4 3.97 1993 The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
author: Wayne Koestenbaum
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2007/12/03
date added: 2007/07/26
shelves:
review:
There's a certain variety of essay writing which I find both eloquent and assertively readable, much harder to come by than you might think. (And by "assertively readable," I mean that it's the kind of book you would happily read all day on the couch with a big glass of ice water and some cigarettes, postponing all obligations.) Wayne Koestenbaum writes a lot of these essays. (I hear that an article in the Believer called them "lyric essays," but the term "lyric" is overwrought enough that I don't really want to bother it anymore.) In this book particularly, Wayne deals with opera and opera fandom in a non-showy but relentlessly intelligent, even academic, way. It's often very personal, chronicling his relationship with opera divas and record collections, but he manages to balance the theory-level speculation so nicely. I'm only fifty pages in and already I feel compelled to write a review, and that alone should speak volumes.
]]> Lost in the Cosmos 147605 256 Walker Percy 0671630067 Sarah 0 4.15 1983 Lost in the Cosmos
author: Walker Percy
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at: 2007/03/01
date added: 2007/07/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lovely Me the Life of Jacqueline Susann]]> 131156 0 Barbara Seaman 096587706X Sarah 0 4.00 1987 Lovely Me the Life of Jacqueline Susann
author: Barbara Seaman
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2007/11/25
date added: 2007/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Krazy Kat and 76 More: Stories 1950-1976]]> 440004 375 Fielding Dawson 087685563X Sarah 3 4.29 Krazy Kat and 76 More: Stories 1950-1976
author: Fielding Dawson
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2007/11/25
date added: 2007/04/18
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Metaphysician in the Dark (Poets On Poetry)]]> 224055 Often, he addresses poetry itself. Among the pieces here are appreciations of Mark Strand, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and James Tate, each evaluated with a keen eye tempered by a generous spirit. Other essays discuss Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, and Vasko Popa; to these writers he brings the understanding available only to those who can read them in the original. In considering Brodsky's translations, for instance, he offers insights regarding not only the poet himself but the very nature of language. Elsewhere, he peers into poetry's past and its as a vessel of memory, a witness to history, and a mirror of human experience.
But perhaps the greatest pleasures afforded by The Metaphysician in the Dark, as he styles himself with a beguiling mix of modesty and irony, appear when Simic goes further afield. His look at the deadpan comedy of Buster Keaton is as revealing of the author as of the actor and his craft; his perusal of a Heironymous Bosch altarpiece captures both the painter's sense of apocalypse and a riotous joy in the piling of detail upon detail; his review of a book on Joseph Cornell examines how obsession becomes art. He is fluently familiar with subjects as diverse as Saul Bellow's novels and Aberlardo Morell's extraordinary camera obscura photographs. Yet when he takes the gloves off, as in two essays on the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic, his outrage is as forceful as his pride is strong in his own Serbian heritage.
Each of the two dozen essays here reflects a sophistication irresistible in its simplicity; taken together, they display a questing intelligence and a panorama of life and art.
Charles Simic is an acclaimed poet, novelist, essayist and teacher. Winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, he is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry and six books of prose, as well as numerous translations. He is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973.]]> 192 Charles Simic 047206830X Sarah 3 3.98 2003 The Metaphysician in the Dark (Poets On Poetry)
author: Charles Simic
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2007/11/25
date added: 2007/04/18
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]]> The Man Suit 659775 112 Zachary Schomburg 0977770931 Sarah 3 4.22 2007 The Man Suit
author: Zachary Schomburg
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/04/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)]]> 12749 In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings Proust’s masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis’s internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann’s Way.]]> 468 Marcel Proust 0142437964 Sarah 0 to-read 4.12 1913 Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1913
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/04/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Miner's Pale Children 344855 235 W.S. Merwin 0805028706 Sarah 2 to-read 4.14 1970 The Miner's Pale Children
author: W.S. Merwin
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1970
rating: 2
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date added: 2007/04/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Black Tickets: Stories 420183 Black Tickets now stands as a classic.

With an uncanny ability to depict the lives of men and women who rarely register in American literature, Phillips writes stories that lay bare their suffering and joy. Here are the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man who wants it least. A stripper, the daughter of a witch, escapes from poverty into another kind of violence. A young girl during the Depression is caught between the love of her crazy father and the no less powerful love of her sorrowful mother. These are great American stories that have earned a privileged place in modern literature.

Wedding picture --
Home --
Blind girls --
Lechery --
Mamasita --
Black tickets --
The powder of the angels, and I'm yours --
Stripper --
El Paso --
Under the boardwalk --
Sweethearts --
1934 --
Solo dance --
The heavenly animal --
Happy --
Stars --
The patron --
Strangers in the night --
Souvenir --
What it takes to keep a young girl alive --
Cheers --
Snow --
Satisfaction --
Country --
Slave --
Accidents --
Gemcrack]]> 288 Jayne Anne Phillips 0375727353 Sarah 3 4.00 1979 Black Tickets: Stories
author: Jayne Anne Phillips
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/04/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts]]> 28636 176 Milan Kundera 0060841869 Sarah 0 to-read 4.01 2005 The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
author: Milan Kundera
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/04/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Collected Stories 33299 432 Amy Hempel 0743289463 Sarah 5 4.28 2006 The Collected Stories
author: Amy Hempel
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/04/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers]]> 512483 400 Allen Grossman 0801842425 Sarah 5
The Sighted Singer takes two approaches to the aforementioned: the first half contains conversations between Grossman and Halliday, while the second part encompasses Grossman's take on (and I'm totally not kidding here) every major technique of lyrical poetry. Hey, he doesn't call it the Summa Lyrica for no damn reason. Kind of like reading a Taoist Heidegger on the work of the line as it applies to eternity. And the conversations, of course, read like really meaty interviews (or interviews in which both participants are interviewing each other, which it occurs to me is a kind of silly thing to say given that conversations are like that usually, unless you're talking with an Interruptor and then it all goes to hell). ]]> 3.88 1991 The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers
author: Allen Grossman
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2007/04/17
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I'm kind of a poetry nerd. (You are not shocked.) Accordingly, I love reading prose by poets on poetry, interviews, book reviews, whatever. It's something about the way a poet can use a sentence that always gets me, and also (of course) something about the way a particularly insightful poet can illuminate all of the invisible (but moving) gears inside the poem machine.

The Sighted Singer takes two approaches to the aforementioned: the first half contains conversations between Grossman and Halliday, while the second part encompasses Grossman's take on (and I'm totally not kidding here) every major technique of lyrical poetry. Hey, he doesn't call it the Summa Lyrica for no damn reason. Kind of like reading a Taoist Heidegger on the work of the line as it applies to eternity. And the conversations, of course, read like really meaty interviews (or interviews in which both participants are interviewing each other, which it occurs to me is a kind of silly thing to say given that conversations are like that usually, unless you're talking with an Interruptor and then it all goes to hell).
]]> <![CDATA[The Route as Briefed (Poets On Poetry)]]> 345792 In typical Tate style, the book continually straddles the line between fiction and autobiography, entertaining readers with amusing accounts of the poet's own experiences while drawing on these to narrate the fictional stories as well.
James Tate is Professor of Poetry, University of Massachusetts. He is the author of a number of books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Poems , 1994; Selected Poems , 1991; Distance from Loved Ones , 1990. He has received several awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1992.]]> 176 James Vincent Tate 0472096915 Sarah 3 3.88 1999 The Route as Briefed (Poets On Poetry)
author: James Vincent Tate
name: Sarah
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2007/11/25
date added: 2007/04/13
shelves:
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]]> In Persuasion Nation 331689 240 George Saunders 159448922X Sarah 3
So, In Persuasion Nation is a new iteration of similar ideas, which is great. Saunders is a realist in the hyper- sense: as much as these stories may read as farce/science fiction, they're uncomfortably true to the climate of now. (Sometimes the hyper-real voices, likes and ums and weird grammar all together, begin to grate across a few stories. It's a small complaint but worth noting.) And anyway, I can only read so many stories about quiet, mid-life, midwestern desperation.

By the way, if you're interested in hyper-real fiction, you may want to check the Believer for an article a few months back on Doctorow's oscillating ideas about what level of representation constitutes "the real" in fiction.]]> 4.00 2006 In Persuasion Nation
author: George Saunders
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2007/04/13
shelves:
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George Saunders seems to have made a pretty solid career for himself by skewering the massively weird and distant ways we consume goods (and by goods here I mean history and information as well as pre-packed food dreck). After reading his last few books I admit I was a little worried for George--it seemed like he had found a good basic situation in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, mostly the struggle to remain authentically human in a themepark simulation of the real world. These are great stories and I'm glad somebody wrote them, but with his obvious talent for incisive cultural observation, it seemed a little disappointing to watch him reiterate a particular plotline.

So, In Persuasion Nation is a new iteration of similar ideas, which is great. Saunders is a realist in the hyper- sense: as much as these stories may read as farce/science fiction, they're uncomfortably true to the climate of now. (Sometimes the hyper-real voices, likes and ums and weird grammar all together, begin to grate across a few stories. It's a small complaint but worth noting.) And anyway, I can only read so many stories about quiet, mid-life, midwestern desperation.

By the way, if you're interested in hyper-real fiction, you may want to check the Believer for an article a few months back on Doctorow's oscillating ideas about what level of representation constitutes "the real" in fiction.
]]> Mosquito 333964 70 Alex Lemon 0977312747 Sarah 2 4.25 2006 Mosquito
author: Alex Lemon
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2007/11/25
date added: 2007/04/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction]]> 18794 213 J.D. Salinger 0606288384 Sarah 4 4.03 1955 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Sarah
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1955
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/04/13
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]]>