en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 03:30:27 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 44149 154 Georges Simenon 0143037277 Jon 5 maigret, belgian 3.59 1931
author: Georges Simenon
name: Jon
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at: 2011/08/04
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: maigret, belgian
review:

]]> 57496542 The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in middle management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him, however often he and his mother and wife move in search of it. He thinks of embarking on his writing career with something simple, a detective novel, and ponders the possibility of choosing a victim among the people he knows and planning a crime as if he himself were the killer. That way, he hopes, his book might finally begin to take shape.

The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation, after the dedication “To the victims of expectation�� in Zama. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer’s words, “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish.”]]> 176 Antonio di Benedetto 1681375621 Jon 4 argentinian, nyrb 3.76 1964
author: Antonio di Benedetto
name: Jon
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: argentinian, nyrb
review:

]]> 40763 In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. Apart from being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.]]> 328 Gustave Flaubert 1564783936 Jon 0 3.86 1881
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Jon
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1881
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: currently-reading, dalkey-archive, french
review:

]]> 63030 Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions.

For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.")

Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in such a dark and glittering fashion as Roberto Bolaño."]]> 150 Roberto Bolaño 0811215865 Jon 5 chilean, new-directions 3.99 1996
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Jon
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/17
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: chilean, new-directions
review:

]]> 10282788
Meanwhile, the clerk and his family begin to keep guinea pigs, and at night, when everyone is asleep, our hero begins to conduct experiments with the pets, teaching them tricks, testing their intelligence and endurance, and using some rather questionable methods to encourage the animals to befriend him.]]> 167 Ludvík Vaculík 1934824348 Jon 4 3.71 1970
author: Ludvík Vaculík
name: Jon
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: czechoslovakian, open-letter, writers-from-the-other-europe
review:

]]> 1463433 "Kis is one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century . . . Danilo Kis preserves the honor of literature."â Partisan Review

Composed of seven dark tales, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich presents variations on the theme of political and social self-destruction throughout Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The characters in these stories are caught in a world of political hypocrisy, which ultimately leads to death, their common fate. Although the stories Kis tells are based on historical events, the beauty and precision of his prose elevates these ostensibly true stories into works of literary art that transcend the politics of their time.]]> 135 Danilo Kiš 0140054529 Jon 5 3.85 1976
author: Danilo Kiš
name: Jon
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at: 2014/02/14
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: yugoslavian, book-club, dalkey-archive, writers-from-the-other-europe
review:

]]> 1586147 107 Bohumil Hrabal 0140058087 Jon 4 3.89 1965
author: Bohumil Hrabal
name: Jon
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2015/11/27
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: czechoslovakian, writers-from-the-other-europe
review:

]]> 244261
Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.]]> 160 Bruno Schulz 0140186255 Jon 4 4.18 1933
author: Bruno Schulz
name: Jon
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at: 2015/04/17
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: polish, writers-from-the-other-europe
review:

]]> 13189472 Ferdydurke was deemed scandalous and subversive by Nazis, Stalinists, and the Polish Communist regime in turn and was officially banned in Poland for decades. It has nonetheless remained one of the most influential works of twentieth-century European literature.]]> 308 Witold Gombrowicz 0300181671 Jon 5 3.70 1937
author: Witold Gombrowicz
name: Jon
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at: 2013/07/28
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: polish, writers-from-the-other-europe
review:

]]> 61340209 The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.]]> 144 Olga Ravn 0811234827 Jon 4 danish, new-directions 3.73 2018
author: Olga Ravn
name: Jon
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: danish, new-directions
review:

]]> 30062373 282 Larry Livermore 0989196348 Jon 4 american, music 4.38
author: Larry Livermore
name: Jon
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: american, music
review:

]]> 59766
The San Francisco Chronicle said Hofmann’s “sleek translation does a wonderful job�� and The New York Times �� “Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.”]]> 218 Franz Kafka 0811215695 Jon 5 3.60 1927
author: Franz Kafka
name: Jon
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1927
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: austro-hungarian, german, new-directions
review:

]]> 48566540
Sam McPheeters championed many different versions. Over the course of two decades, he fronted Born Against, released dozens of records and fanzines, and toured seventeen times across the northern hemisphere. In this collection of essays, profiles, criticism, and personal history, he examines the diverse realms he intersected—New York hardcore, Riot Grrrl, Gilman street, the hidden enclaves of Olympia, New England, and downtown Los Angeles—and the forces of mental illness and creative inspiration that drove him, and others, in the first place.]]> 265 Sam McPheeters 1947856987 Jon 5 american, music 4.09 2020
author: Sam McPheeters
name: Jon
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: american, music
review:

]]> 53575905 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.]]> 144 Adania Shibli Jon 4 new-directions, palestinian 4.17 2017
author: Adania Shibli
name: Jon
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/23
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: new-directions, palestinian
review:

]]> 50165140 From Ann and Jeff VanderMeer comes The Big Book of Modern Fantasy a true horde of tales sure to delight fans, scholars -- even the greediest of dragons. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

Step through a shimmering portal . . . a worn wardrobe door . . . a schism in sky . . . into a bold new age of fantasy. When worlds beyond worlds became a genre unto itself. From the swinging sixties to the strange, strange seventies, the over-the-top eighties to the gnarly nineties--and beyond, into the twenty-first century--the VanderMeers have found the stories and the writers from around the world that reinvented and revitalized the fantasy genre after World War II. The stories in this collection represent twenty-two different countries, including Russia, Argentina, Nigeria, Columbia, Pakistan, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, China, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic. Five have never before been translated into English.

From Jorge Luis Borges to Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock to Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett to Stephen King, the full range and glory of the fantastic are on display in these ninety-one stories in which dragons soar, giants stomp, and human children should still think twice about venturing alone into the dark forest.

Completing Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's definitive The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, this companion volume to takes the genre into the twenty-first century with ninety-one astonishing, mind-bending stories.]]> 896 Ann VanderMeer 0525563865 Jon 5 french, post-exotic 3.79 2020
author: Ann VanderMeer
name: Jon
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: french, post-exotic
review:
Obtained for Manuela Draeger [Antoine Volodine]’s “The Arrest of the Great Mimille," translated by Brian Evenson and Valerie Mariana. Great stuff, especially if you like the three Bobby Potempkine stories collected in “In the Time of the Blue Ball.�� One more of these stories so far been translated into English: Draeger’s “Belle-Medusa,�� in “xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths,�� edited by Kate Bernheimer.
]]> 17707758 Fifty leading writers retell myths from around the world in this dazzling follow-up to the bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.

Icarus flies once more. Aztec jaguar gods again stalk the earth. An American soldier designs a new kind of Trojan horse—his cremains in a bullet. Here, in beguiling guise, are your favorite mythological figures alongside characters from Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions.
��
Aimee Bender retells the myth of the Titans.
��
Madeline Miller retells the myth of Galatea.
��
Kevin Wilson retells the myth of Phaeton, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
��
Emma Straub and Peter Straub retell the myth of Persephone.
��
Heidi Julavits retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice.
��
Ron Currie, Jr. retells the myth of Dedalus.
��
Maile Meloy retells the myth of Demeter.
��
Zachary Mason retells the myth of Narcissus.
��
Joy Williams retells the myth of Argos, Odysseus�� dog.
��
If “xo�� signals a goodbye, then xo Orpheus is a goodbye to an old way of mythmaking. Featuring talkative goats, a cat lady, a bird woman, a beer-drinking ogre, a squid who falls in love with the sun, and a girl who gives birth to cubs, here are extravagantly imagined, bracingly contemporary stories, heralding a new beginning for one of the world’s oldest literary traditions.]]> 531 Kate Bernheimer 0143122428 Jon 0 post-exotic
The book as whole is intriguing, and I look forward to checking out the rest.]]> 3.43 2013
author: Kate Bernheimer
name: Jon
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2016/02/13
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: post-exotic
review:
So far, I've only read the two pieces that prompted me to buy the book: the ones by Manuela Draeger and Lutz Bassman, both heteronyms of French writer Antoine Volodine (which is the umbrella nom de plume for this brilliant, anonymous author). Draeger's piece is the fourth of her ten Bobby Potemkine stories to be published in English. The Bassman is a story from a collection called "Dance With Nathan Golshem," which, based on the strenth of this selection, I'm hoping will be translated in its entirety. Each of Volodine's post-exotic texts informs all the rest, facets of an intricate world that is only slowly being revealed to English speaking readers.

The book as whole is intriguing, and I look forward to checking out the rest.
]]> 208511278 406 László Krasznahorkai 0811231534 Jon 5 hungarian, new-directions 4.32 2021
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Jon
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves: hungarian, new-directions
review:

]]> 34847123 34 Fleur Jaeggy 0811226883 Jon 4 new-directions, swiss 4.03 2009
author: Fleur Jaeggy
name: Jon
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2017/09/17
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: new-directions, swiss
review:

]]> 325785 Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, avoids some of the mistakes that have marred earlier versions and seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work. The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.]]> 1152 Karl Marx 0140445684 Jon 4 german 4.28 1867
author: Karl Marx
name: Jon
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1867
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: german
review:

]]> 6570431 Old Filth has been acclaimed as Jane Gardam's masterpiece, a book where life and art merge. And now that beautiful, haunting novel has been joined by a companion that also bursts with humor and wisdom: The Man in the Wooden Hat.

Old Filth was Eddie's story. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.

They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.

As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the 50-year union of two remarkable people, the novel is a triumph. The Man in the Wooden Hat is fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power. It will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and so thoroughly satisfying.]]> 233 Jane Gardam 1933372893 Jon 5 english, europa-editions 4.04
author: Jane Gardam
name: Jon
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2013/01/18
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: english, europa-editions
review:

]]> 210277341 A warrior struggles through an apocalyptic landscape and the world after death ��

Kree Toronto has been raised as a warrior in a ravaged postapocalyptic, posthuman world, the population decimated by wars and civilization long since collapsed. After her attempt to avenge the death of her dog, Loka, goes horribly wrong, Kree finds herself lost in a world after death and wanders into the city of the terrible mendicants.

Under the Brothers�� totalitarian rule, Kree can lead a quiet life and forget her violent past, even if needles grow in her skull and hallucinatory blood rains pour down now and then to remind her. She can make friends: a shamanic healer with a shaking tent, a mysterious stranger hatched from an egg, and a gruff Tibetan electrician in a world without electricity. And she can have her Loka, as long as she toes the Party line and does as she’s told. When she can’t—when her friends start to disappear and the Brothers turn against her—Kree sets out on a quest, searching for a new way forward.

Multiply reincarnated and unstuck in time, Kree is the characteristically marvelous creation of Manuela Draeger, whose extraordinary stories, in the words of author China Miéville, “are as close to dreams as fiction can be.”]]> 280 Manuela Draeger 1517915120 Jon 5 french, post-exotic 3.52 2020
author: Manuela Draeger
name: Jon
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves: french, post-exotic
review:

]]> 199634680
A meditative, postapocalyptic noir, Mevlido’s Dreams is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse. Mevlido is a double agent working for the police and living in the last habitable city on the planet, a sprawling abyssal ruin marked by war and ruled by criminals. Suspended in the bardo between his loyalty to the surveillance state and to the anarchists, communists, and other rebels he monitors, Mevlido clings to life and hope—barely—in the city’s vast slums, haunted by the memory of the wife he failed to save during the last war and dreaming of a mysterious mission he is told he must accomplish. At the same time, an enigmatic organization existing elsewhere—the Organs—observes Mevlido’s actions and debates its responsibility to him and to humanity as a whole.�� �� Asking what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world, this dense, brilliantly detailed postcollapse reality imagined by Antoine Volodine is one that grows ever more relevant amidst intensifying climate and political catastrophes. A key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe, Mevlido’s Dreams envisions a world changed beyond recognition and ruled under irrational authoritarianism in which dreams nest within dreams and the boundaries between life and death are fluid and uncertain.]]> 352 Antoine Volodine 151791714X Jon 5 french, post-exotic 4.25 2007
author: Antoine Volodine
name: Jon
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: french, post-exotic
review:

]]> 20613761 Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.]]> 169 Claudia Rankine 1555976905 Jon 4 american 4.27 2014
author: Claudia Rankine
name: Jon
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/22
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: american
review:

]]> 164052863 0 StefanZweig Jon 4 austrian, nyrb 4.00
author: StefanZweig
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/22
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: austrian, nyrb
review:

]]> 54962156 212 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 0803278349 Jon 0 book-club, spanish 3.57 1542
author: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
name: Jon
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1542
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/20
date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: book-club, spanish
review:

]]> 834726
The Portrait of a Lady is the most stunning achievement of Henry James's early period--in the 1860s and '70s when he was transforming himself from a talented young American into a resident of Europe, a citizen of the world, and one of the greatest novelists of modern times. A kind of delight at the success of this transformation informs every page of this masterpiece.]]> 672 Henry James 0679405623 Jon 5 american, english 4.14 1881
author: Henry James
name: Jon
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1881
rating: 5
read at: 2013/03/10
date added: 2024/01/26
shelves: american, english
review:

]]> 83017 198 Dino Buzzati 1567923046 Jon 5 italian 4.24 1940
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Jon
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/22
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves: italian
review:

]]> 140730
On a bender now, Steve makes a friend: Sid Halligan, an escapee from Sing Sing. Steve tells Sid all about Nancy. Most men are scared, Steve thinks, but not Sid.

The next day, Steve wakes up on the side of the road. His car has a flat, his money is gone, and there’s one more thing still left for him to learn about Nancy, Sid Halligan, and himself.]]> 154 Georges Simenon 1590171934 Jon 4 nyrb 3.82 1953
author: Georges Simenon
name: Jon
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1953
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/01/03
shelves: nyrb
review:

]]> 34082 Also includes Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems (1920), and The Sacred Wood
Introduction by Mary Karr
��
First published in 1922, “The Waste Land,�� T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot’s poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a potent new poetic language. As Kenneth Rexroth wrote, Eliot “articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression.�� As commanding as his verse, Eliot’s criticism also transformed twentieth-century letters, and this Modern Library edition includes a selection of Eliot’s most important essays.]]> 272 T.S. Eliot 0375759344 Jon 4 poetry, american 4.21 1922
author: T.S. Eliot
name: Jon
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1922
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: poetry, american
review:

]]> 33144408
Bob Seger-loving, Dunkies-sipping, warding off the backslide. His band is The Steamrollers. His wife is Saundra (for now). His daughter is Nancy, and her favorite word is shampoo or loops or whatever friggin suits her.

Through four seasons and a restless survey, Kelly’s Roast Beef and Salisbury Beach, Steve Industry leaks his heart into his harmonica solo.

Hilarious and tender, Ben Hersey’s debut novel disgorges a powerful new vision of contemporary working class New England.]]> 303 Ben Hersey 0996414320 Jon 5 american, book-club 4.71
author: Ben Hersey
name: Jon
average rating: 4.71
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2017/03/19
date added: 2023/08/24
shelves: american, book-club
review:

]]> 54191870 Now fully compatible with the MPC Live II & MPC 2.8!

Learn how to sample, sequence and produce your own beats and songs in Akai's standalone touchscreen MPCs; the MPC X, MPC Live, MPC Live II & MPC One!

The 'MPC Bible' from MPC-Tutor is the complete guide to using the latest MPC firmware 2.8, packed with practical, 'hands-on' beat making projects that teach you everything from core beginner's concepts all the way up to advanced power-user techniques!]]> 790 Andy Avgousti Jon 0 english, music, reference 4.86 2017
author: Andy Avgousti
name: Jon
average rating: 4.86
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/05
date added: 2023/08/05
shelves: english, music, reference
review:

]]> 15808516
In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one- square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature's path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life.

Each of this book's short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell spins a brilliant web of biology and ecology, explaining the science that binds together the tiniest microbes and the largest mammals and describing the ecosystems that have cycled for thousands- sometimes millions-of years. Each visit to the forest presents a nature story in miniature as Haskell elegantly teases out the intricate relationships that order the creatures and plants that call it home.
]]> 288 David George Haskell 0143122940 Jon 5 nature 4.33 2012
author: David George Haskell
name: Jon
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/05
date added: 2023/08/05
shelves: nature
review:

]]> 129705425 0 Octavia E. Butler Jon 5 american, book-club 4.25 1995
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Jon
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/05
date added: 2023/08/05
shelves: american, book-club
review:

]]> 4268359
Then a family member dies in Madrid and there is an inheritance to sort out. Pascualita wants to go to Spain, which is supposedly opening up in response to the 1960s, and Don Celestino feels he has no choice but to follow. He is full of dread and desire, foreseeing a heroic last confrontation with his enemies, but what he encounters instead is a new commercialized Spain that has no time for the past, much less for him. Or so it seems. Because the last act of Don Celestino’s dizzying personal drama will prove that though “there is nothing serious . . . , there is tragedy.��

An astonishing modern take on Don Quixote, Chaos and Night untangles the ties between politics and paranoia, self-loathing and self-pity, rage and remorse. It is the darkly funny final flowering of the art of Henry de Montherlant, a solitary and scarifying modern master whose work, admired by Graham Greene and Albert Camus, is sure to appeal to contemporary readers of Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño.]]> 256 Henry de Montherlant 159017304X Jon 5 french, nyrb 3.78 1963
author: Henry de Montherlant
name: Jon
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/29
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves: french, nyrb
review:

]]> 391253 96 Julien Gracq 1885586868 Jon 4 french 3.80 1948
author: Julien Gracq
name: Jon
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1948
rating: 4
read at: 2015/11/29
date added: 2023/07/25
shelves: french
review:

]]> 466354 384 Hans Fallada 0897330862 Jon 5 german 4.03 1932
author: Hans Fallada
name: Jon
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/23
date added: 2023/07/23
shelves: german
review:

]]> 17694
Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical some narratives, some single images, some parables. These “aphorisms�� appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings–some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka’s death in 1924. While working on K ., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zürau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka’s opus–a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.

The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.]]> 160 Franz Kafka 0805212078 Jon 3 austro-hungarian, aphorisms 3.92 1931
author: Franz Kafka
name: Jon
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1931
rating: 3
read at: 2013/04/21
date added: 2023/07/21
shelves: austro-hungarian, aphorisms
review:

]]> 19022 107 Don DeLillo 033042694X Jon 3 drama, american 3.42 1999
author: Don DeLillo
name: Jon
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/05/22
shelves: drama, american
review:

]]> 52974298 Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle “Entering the Madness of Others�� and offers an epigraph: “Reality is no obstacle.”��Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a “gray little librarian�� with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville (“I too resided on East 26th Street…I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office��), which itself is just one aspect of his also being ��constantly conscious of his connectedness�� to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the “drunkard Cowley�� and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville but also tracing the paths to “a Serene Paradise of Knowledge.�� Driven to save that palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but ��people must be told the truth��: THERE IS NO DUALISM IN EXISTENCE. And his dream, in fact, will be “realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace.”]]> 96 László Krasznahorkai 0811228401 Jon 5 hungarian, new-directions 3.98 2018
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Jon
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/24
date added: 2023/04/24
shelves: hungarian, new-directions
review:

]]> 60528571 This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award winner László Krasznahorkai—perhaps his most serene and poetic work�� describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way. Despite the difficulties in finding the garden, the reader is closely introduced to the construction processes of the monastery (described in poetic detail) as well as the geological and biological processes of the surrounding area (the underground layers revealed beneath a bed of moss, the transportation of cypress-tree seeds by the wind, feral foxes and stray dogs meandering outside the monastery’s walls),making this an unforgettable meditation on nature, life, history, and being.]]> 130 László Krasznahorkai 0811234479 Jon 5 hungarian, new-directions 3.83 2003
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Jon
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/21
date added: 2023/04/21
shelves: hungarian, new-directions
review:

]]> 59575939 A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world --from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.

In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.]]> 464 Ed Yong Jon 4 american, nature 4.46 2022
author: Ed Yong
name: Jon
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/05
date added: 2023/02/05
shelves: american, nature
review:

]]> 7770334
It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.]]> 191 J.A. Baker Jon 5 nyrb, english, nature 4.50 1967
author: J.A. Baker
name: Jon
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2011/01/01
date added: 2023/01/18
shelves: nyrb, english, nature
review:

]]> 11037701
Despite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles, The Peregrine is set on the flat marshes of the Essex coast, where J A Baker spent a long winter looking and writing about the visitors from the uplands �� peregrines that spend the winter hunting the huge flocks of pigeons and waders that share the desolate landscape with them.

Including original diaries from which The Peregrine was written and its companion volume The Hill of Summer, this is a beautiful compendium of lyrical nature writing at its absolute best.

Such luminaries as Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion have cited this as one of the most important books in 20th Century nature writing, and the bestselling author Mark Cocker has provided an introduction on the importance of Baker, his writings and the diaries �� creating the essential volume of Baker's writings.

Since the hardback was published in 2010, papers, maps, and letters have come to light which in turn provide a little more background into J A Baker’s history. Contemporaries �� particularly from while he was at school in Chelmsford �� have kindly provided insights, remembering a school friend who clearly made an impact on his generation. In the longer term, there is hope of an archive of these papers being established, but in the meantime, and with the arrival of this paperback edition, there is a chance to reveal a little more of what has been learned.


Among fragments of letters to Baker was one from a reader who praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report, this article �� entitled On the Essex Coast �� appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the kind agreement of the RSPB, it has been included in this updated new paperback edition of Baker’s astounding work.]]> 432 J.A. Baker 0007395906 Jon 5 book-club, english, nature 4.25 2010
author: J.A. Baker
name: Jon
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2012/11/24
date added: 2023/01/18
shelves: book-club, english, nature
review:

]]> 27333
The book appeared in September 1962 and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement.]]> 378 Rachel Carson 0618249060 Jon 5 american, nature 4.04 1962
author: Rachel Carson
name: Jon
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2017/03/11
date added: 2023/01/18
shelves: american, nature
review:

]]> 15814533
A lifelong birder, tracker, and naturalist, Jon Young is guided by three basic the robin, junco, and other songbirds know everything important about their environment, be it backyard or forest; by tuning in to their vocalizations and behavior, we can acquire much of this wisdom for our own pleasure and benefit; and the birds�� companion calls and warning alarms are just as important as their songs.

Deep bird language is an ancient discipline, perfected by Indigenous peoples the world over, and science is finally catching up. This groundbreaking book unites the Indigenous knowledge and the author’s own experience of more than four decades in the field to lead us toward a deeper connection to the animals and, in the end, a deeper connection to ourselves.

“This elegant book will deepen the kinship between humans and other species. It decodes our common language.”—Richard Louv, author of Our Wild How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives?and Save Theirs]]> 272 Jon Young 054400230X Jon 5 american, reference, nature 4.26 2012
author: Jon Young
name: Jon
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/01
date added: 2023/01/18
shelves: american, reference, nature
review:

]]> 22405654
Drinking way too much and breaking up with his wife, an exiled journalist in Mexico City dreams of returning home to El Salvador. But is it really a dream or a nightmare? When he decides to treat his liver pain with hypnosis, his few impulse-control mechanisms rapidly dissolve. Hair-brained schemes, half-mad arguments, unraveling murder plots, hysterical rants: everything escalates at a maniacal pace, especially the crazy humor.]]> 136 Horacio Castellanos Moya 0811223434 Jon 3 3.77 2013
author: Horacio Castellanos Moya
name: Jon
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2022/06/08
shelves: new-directions, el-salvadorean
review:

]]> 60730509 Madziwanyika Jon 0 to-read 5.00
author: Madziwanyika
name: Jon
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/06/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18490588 "[Book 2] sears the reader because Knausgaard is a passionate idealist [who] wants to fight the conformity and homogeneity of modern bourgeois existence." —James Wood, The New Yorker

In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his wife, he leads a solitary existence. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic named Geir. He also tracks down Linda, whom he met at a writers' workshop a few years earlier and who fascinated him deeply.

My Struggle: Book 2 is at heart a love story—the story of Karl Ove falling in love with his second wife. But the novel also tells other stories: of becoming a father, of the turbulence of family life, of outrageously unsuccessful attempts at a family vacation, of the emotional strain of birthday parties for children, and of the daily frustrations, rhythms, and distractions of city life keeping him from (and filling) his novel.

It is a brilliant work that emphatically delivers on the unlikely promise that many hundreds of pages later readers will be left breathlessly demanding more.]]> 592 Karl Ove Knausgård 0374534152 Jon 4 norwegian 4.42 2009
author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Jon
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2015/06/11
date added: 2022/05/09
shelves: norwegian
review:

]]> 51283867 128 Franz Kafka 0811228010 Jon 5 4.00 2020
author: Franz Kafka
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/07
date added: 2022/05/07
shelves: austro-hungarian, new-directions
review:

]]> 49547 Excellent Book 154 Stephen Crane 0801491304 Jon 5 poetry, american, favorites 4.35 1899
author: Stephen Crane
name: Jon
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1899
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/07
date added: 2022/05/07
shelves: poetry, american, favorites
review:

]]> 6750964 80 Basil Bunting 1852248262 Jon 5 4.15 1967
author: Basil Bunting
name: Jon
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/07
date added: 2022/05/07
shelves: english, poetry, favorites, book-club, book-club-my-selections
review:

]]> 56709127 204 Lutz Bassmann 1948830434 Jon 5 3.93 2017
author: Lutz Bassmann
name: Jon
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/05
date added: 2022/05/05
shelves: french, open-letter, post-exotic
review:
This is taking me a while, but it’s excellent. Skillfully translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, this frame story filled with short, unfinished tales is structurally reminiscent of Antoine Volodine’s “Minor Angels,�� while cleaving thematically to Volodine heteronym Lutz Bassmann’s other translated book, “We Monks and Soldiers.�� It pays to move through slowly, if ones aim isn’t solely to orient themselves to the ever-changing characters and scenarios particular to this book, but to also attempt to bring into focus Volodine & co.’s interrelated universes, many of which are refracted through the distorted lens of one uncertainly wandering the bardo, recalling a squalid existence among a decimated and enervated humanity rife with capitalist mafiosos, brutal fascists, concentration camps, and vicious pogroms, yet embattled with the fatalistic efforts of imprisoned revolutionary writers, guerrilla “assassins of assassins,�� teleporting bird people, intelligent spiders, and much that appears beyond explanation. A darkly hilarious master of anticlimax, Volodine can read like Kurt Vonnegut, imbued with the revolutionary zeal of Frantz Fanon, yet soaked in the wry resignation of Emil Cioran.
]]> 55479257
Draeger, a heteronym for the acclaimed French writer Antoine Volodine, and a librarian in a dystopic prison camp, gives post-exoticism an element of tenderness, and a sense of nostalgia for children’s tales that is far less visible in the other post-exotic works. Eleven Sooty Dreams is her first book written for adults, a moving story of the constancy of brotherly, loving faithfulness.]]> 150 Manuela Draeger 1948830264 Jon 5 3.98 2010
author: Manuela Draeger
name: Jon
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2021/03/03
date added: 2022/04/15
shelves: french, open-letter, post-exotic
review:

]]> 55707585 A harrowing early novel by one of France’s most unusual contemporary writers��

At once humorous and horrifying, Solo Viola is one of Antoine Volodine’s first forays into post-exoticism. He takes the reader into a fictional world where a variety of characters collide: three prisoners just released from jail, a band of circus performers, a string quartet, a writer, and a bird. All are trying to survive in an absurd and hostile environment of authoritarian spectacle, at the mercy of a tyrannical buffoon, and seeking the strange counterbalance of hope in a viola player, whose stunning music just might save them all, if only for a moment.��]]> 112 Antoine Volodine 1517911192 Jon 5 french, post-exotic 4.04 1991
author: Antoine Volodine
name: Jon
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/22
date added: 2022/04/15
shelves: french, post-exotic
review:

]]> 454095
J. F. Powers was a virtuoso of the American language with a perfect ear for the telling cliché and an unfailing eye for the kitsch that clutters up our lives. This funny and very moving novel about the making and remaking of a priest is one of his finest achievements.]]> 352 J.F. Powers 0940322242 Jon 4 american, nyrb 3.88 1988
author: J.F. Powers
name: Jon
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/14
date added: 2022/04/14
shelves: american, nyrb
review:

]]> 750407 The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.

G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.]]> 394 G.B. Edwards 1590172337 Jon 5 english, nyrb, book-club 4.26 1981
author: G.B. Edwards
name: Jon
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/13
date added: 2022/03/27
shelves: english, nyrb, book-club
review:

]]> 60931 The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]> 288 Octavia E. Butler 0807083690 Jon 4 american 4.30 1979
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Jon
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/22
date added: 2022/03/22
shelves: american
review:

]]> 28953118 From the internationally acclaimed author of The Infatuations comes the mesmerizing story of a couple living in the shadow of a mysterious, unhappy history–a novel about the cruel, tender punishments we exact on those we love.

Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere, nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric, once-successful film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel’s voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost; and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel now asks Juan to investigate.

As Juan draws closer to the truth, he uncovers only more questions. What is at the root of Muriel’s hostility toward his wife? How did Beatriz meet Van Vechten? What happened during the war?

Marías leads us deep into the intrigues of these characters, through a daring exploration of rancor, suspicion, loyalty, trust, and the infinitely permeable boundaries between the deceptions perpetrated on us by others and those we inflict upon ourselves.]]> 444 Javier Marías 1101946083 Jon 4 spanish 3.90 2014
author: Javier Marías
name: Jon
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/18
date added: 2022/03/18
shelves: spanish
review:

]]> 1073750 The Vet’s Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife’s death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.
Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O’Connor and Stephen King, The Vet’s Daughter is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.]]> 152 Barbara Comyns 1590170296 Jon 5 english, nyrb 3.94 1959
author: Barbara Comyns
name: Jon
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/01
date added: 2022/03/01
shelves: english, nyrb
review:

]]> 34274009 144 César Aira 1908276967 Jon 5 argentinian, new-directions 3.39 1992
author: César Aira
name: Jon
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/02/27
shelves: argentinian, new-directions
review:

]]> 112801 Old Masters (subtitled A Comedy) is a novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, which was first published in 1985. It tells of the life and opinions of Reger, a ‘musical philosopher��, through the voice of his acquaintance Atzbacher, a ‘private academic��.

The book is set in Vienna on one day around the year of its publication, 1985. Reger is an 82-year-old music critic who writes pieces for The Times. For over thirty years he has sat on the same bench in front of Tintoretto’s White-bearded Man in the Bordone Room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for four or five hours of the morning of every second day. He finds this environment the one in which he can do his best thinking. He is aided in this habit by the gallery attendant Irrsigler, who prevents other visitors from using the bench when Reger requires it.]]> 156 Thomas Bernhard 0226043916 Jon 5 austrian 4.17 1985
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Jon
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/26
date added: 2022/02/26
shelves: austrian
review:

]]> 20342656
Published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence is a deeply moving addition to the literature of the terrible war that defined the shape of the twentieth century.]]> 184 Béla Zombory-Moldován 1590178092 Jon 4 3.83 2014
author: Béla Zombory-Moldován
name: Jon
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/24
date added: 2022/02/24
shelves: austro-hungarian, hungarian, nyrb
review:

]]> 1059856 The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking.

Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.

“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).�� —Groucho Marx

“A cheerfully uninhibited...variation on the theme of the Innocents Abroad...Miss Dundy comes up with fresh and spirited comedy....Her novel is enormous fun—sparklingly written, genuinely youthful in spirit.�� ��The Atlantic]]> 260 Elaine Dundy 1590172329 Jon 5 american, nyrb 3.66 1958
author: Elaine Dundy
name: Jon
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/22
date added: 2022/02/22
shelves: american, nyrb
review:

]]> 13335631
A pseudo-biographical "stroll" through town and countryside rife with philosophic musings, The Walk has been hailed as the masterpiece of Walser's short prose. Walking features heavily in his writing, but nowhere else is it as elegantly considered. Without walking, "I would be dead," Walser explains, "and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed. Because it is on walks that the lore of nature and the lore of the country are revealed, charming and graceful, to the sense and eyes of the observant walker." The Walk was the first piece of Walser's work to appear in English, and the only one translated before his death. However, Walser heavily revised his most famous novella, altering nearly every sentence, rendering the baroque tone of his tale into something more spare. An introduction by translator Susan Bernofsky explains the history of The Walk, and the difference between its two versions.]]> 89 Robert Walser 0811219925 Jon 5 swiss, new-directions 3.92 1917
author: Robert Walser
name: Jon
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1917
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/17
date added: 2022/02/19
shelves: swiss, new-directions
review:

]]> 56760359 the past did not exist for him, only what was current existed, he was a prisoner of the instant, and he rushed into this instant, an instant that had no continuation, just as it had no earlier version, and he would have told himself—had he had time to think about this between two instants—that he had no need either for past or future for neither existed. But, in fact, he had no time between two instants. Since there’s no such thing as two instants.

Krasznahorkai—celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose—outdoes himself in Chasing Homer, and has, moreover, envisioned the book as a collaborative enterprise, with a beautiful full-color painting by Max Neumann for each of its nineteen chapters to evoke our hero’s plight and--reaching out of the book proper--further propelling his flight by the wildly percussive music of Miklos Szilveszter, with a score for each chapter as well (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes printed in the book). Chasing Homer is a unique and incredibly swift tour of Laszlo’s world—a treat not to be missed.]]> 96 László Krasznahorkai 0811227979 Jon 4 hungarian, new-directions 3.71 2019
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Jon
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/24
date added: 2022/01/24
shelves: hungarian, new-directions
review:

]]> 36389547
At once the moving tale of a young boy forced to confront demons well beyond his age, a sensitive portrayal of a child's point of view, and a spooky Japanese ghost story, Lion's Cross Point is gripping and poignant. Acts of heartless brutality mix with surprising moments of pure kindness, creating this utterly truthful tale of an unforgettable young boy.]]> 128 Masatsugu Ono 193188370X Jon 4 japanese, two-lines-press 3.54 2013
author: Masatsugu Ono
name: Jon
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/22
date added: 2022/01/22
shelves: japanese, two-lines-press
review:

]]> 35176983
Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes -- finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.

This is the story of ten evenings in Frits' life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city street and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him.

Darkly funny and mesmerizing, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.]]> 320 Gerard Reve 1782273018 Jon 5 dutch, pushkin-press 3.18 1947
author: Gerard Reve
name: Jon
average rating: 3.18
book published: 1947
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/22
date added: 2022/01/22
shelves: dutch, pushkin-press
review:

]]> 54258 The Radetzky March charts the history of the Trotta family through three generations spanning the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Through the Battle of Solferino, to the entombment of the last Hapsburg emperor, Roth's intelligent compassionate narrative illuminates the crumbling of a way of life.]]> 363 Joseph Roth 1862076057 Jon 5 australian 4.10 1932
author: Joseph Roth
name: Jon
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/15
date added: 2022/01/15
shelves: australian
review:

]]> 24694 "Bartleby" (also known as "Bartleby the Scrivener") is an intriguing moral allegory set in the business world of mid-19th-century New York. A strange, enigmatic man employed as a clerk in a legal office, Bartleby forces his employer to come to grips with the most basic questions of human responsibility, and haunts the latter's conscience, even after Bartleby's dismissal.
"Benito Cereno," considered one of Melville's best short stories, deals with a bloody slave revolt on a Spanish vessel. A splendid parable of man's struggle against the forces of evil, the carefully developed and mysteriously guarded plot builds to a dramatic climax while revealing the horror and depravity of which man is capable.
Reprinted here from standard texts in a finely made, yet inexpensive new edition, these stories offer the general reader and students of Melville and American literature sterling examples of a literary giant at his story-telling best.
--back cover]]> 104 Herman Melville 0486264734 Jon 5 american 3.78
author: Herman Melville
name: Jon
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/08/11
shelves: american
review:

]]> 7741657 Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.]]> 306 Patti Smith 0060936223 Jon 5 4.33 2010
author: Patti Smith
name: Jon
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2012/11/22
date added: 2021/07/07
shelves: biography-autobiography, memoir, american
review:

]]> 597428 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul.

This edition contains extensive background on the novel as well as literary criticism focusing on three different controversies surrounding the novel.]]> 551 Gerald Graff 0312112254 Jon 5 american 3.76
author: Gerald Graff
name: Jon
average rating: 3.76
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2009/08/22
date added: 2021/07/07
shelves: american
review:

]]> 8219220
Job is the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious, destitute Eastern-European Jew and children’s Torah teacher whose faith is tested at every turn. His youngest son seems to be incurably disabled, one of his older sons joins the Russian Army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is running around with a Cossack. When he flees with his wife and daughter, further blows of fate await him . . .
��
In this modern fable based on the biblical story of Job, Mendel Singer witnesses the collapse of his world, experiences unbearable suffering and loss, and ultimately gives up hope and curses God, only to be saved by a miraculous reversal of fortune.]]> 211 Joseph Roth 0982624603 Jon 4 archipeligo, german 4.20 1930
author: Joseph Roth
name: Jon
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1930
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/19
date added: 2021/06/19
shelves: archipeligo, german
review:

]]> 399959 142 Chris Elliott 0385297300 Jon 4 3.80 1989
author: Chris Elliott
name: Jon
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/16
date added: 2021/02/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 2702636 "Could I see the chairs, please?" ..."Chairs, chairs. What does the child mean?" ..."Oh, she means the chairs in your hall, the ones your husband had covered with skin. I'm afraid she is a morbid little thing." She giggled and bounced about on her rickety chair.

Her father dies and the ten-year-old Frances, her mother and assorted siblings are taken under the wing of their horsey relations, led by bullying Aunt Lawrence. Their new home is small and they can't afford a maid. Mother occasionally dabs at the furniture with a duster and sister Polly rules the kitchen. Living in patronised poverty isn't much fun but Frances makes friends with Mrs Alexander who has a collection of monkeys and a yellow motor car, and the young widow, Vanda, who is friendly if the Major isn't due to call. But times do change and one day Aunt Lawrence gets her come-uppance and Frances goes to live in the house with 'the skin chairs'.

First published in 1962, this quirky novel describing the adult world with a young girl's eye, resounds with Barbara Comyn's original voice.]]> 200 Barbara Comyns 0860684806 Jon 5 english 4.22 1962
author: Barbara Comyns
name: Jon
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2020/12/29
date added: 2020/12/29
shelves: english
review:

]]> 51272602 139 Aaron Cometbus Jon 5 american 4.31
author: Aaron Cometbus
name: Jon
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2020/12/20
date added: 2020/12/20
shelves: american
review:

]]> 97472 208 J.R. Ackerley 0940322110 Jon 4 english, nyrb 3.29 1956
author: J.R. Ackerley
name: Jon
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/20
date added: 2020/12/20
shelves: english, nyrb
review:

]]> 527724 The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese's last and greatest novel, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn't taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years of Fascism; perhaps, he even thinks, he will settle down. And yet as he uncovers a secret and savage history from the war—a tale of betrayal and reprisal, sex and death—he finds that the past still haunts the present.

The Moon and the Bonfires is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years. Here it appears in a vigorous new English version by R. W. Flint, whose earlier translations of Pavese's fiction were acclaimed by Leslie Fiedler as "absolutely lucid and completely incantatory."

Winner of the 2003 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

]]> 154 Cesare Pavese 1590170210 Jon 3 nyrb, italian 3.83 1950
author: Cesare Pavese
name: Jon
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at: 2011/04/05
date added: 2020/12/01
shelves: nyrb, italian
review:

]]> 53879205 From the National Book Award–winning author of Underworld , a “daring…provocative…exquisite�� (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

What follows is a “brilliant and astonishing…masterpiece�� (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. “DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel�� (Entertainment Weekly).

“In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we’ve come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo’s entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.�� —Rachel Kushner]]> 0 Don DeLillo 1797117602 Jon 4 american 2.49 2020
author: Don DeLillo
name: Jon
average rating: 2.49
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/17
date added: 2020/11/17
shelves: american
review:

]]> 44824588
Written in Yiddish in 1905 and published with immediate success in Warsaw in 1909, A Death utilizes the influences of Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer to depict a distinctly Jewish experience of homelessness and uprooted modernity. Zalman Shneour’s short novel presents a much lesser-known strand of Jewish decadent literature and an authorial voice that has been buried for too long. This introduction of Shneour’s inaugural novel is his first appearance in English since 1963. Its exploration of alienation, mental health, toxic masculinity, and violence is remarkably contemporary.

Born in Shklow, Zalman Shneour (1887��1959) was a major figure of Jewish modernity and one of the most popular Yiddish writer between the World Wars. He wrote poetry, prose, and plays in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Like many of his generation, his life was spent moving from city to city in search of literary community or escaping political turmoil: from Odessa to Warsaw to Vilne, and on to such Western cities as Bern, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, New York (where he died), and Tel Aviv (where he is buried). His psychological fiction brought the insights of Nietzsche and Freud into the narrative world of Eastern European Jewish life.]]> 157 Zalman Shneour 1939663458 Jon 5 wakefield-press 4.02 1909
author: Zalman Shneour
name: Jon
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1909
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/18
date added: 2020/08/18
shelves: wakefield-press
review:

]]> 75220 Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets--scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape.

Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment--theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was.

Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written--an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities.]]> 414 Lucy Sante Jon 5 american 4.11 1991
author: Lucy Sante
name: Jon
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/15
date added: 2020/08/15
shelves: american
review:

]]> 49045472 154 Robin DiAngelo Jon 3 american 4.19 2018
author: Robin DiAngelo
name: Jon
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2020/08/14
date added: 2020/08/14
shelves: american
review:

]]> 17574849 The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living. A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. Soon they are buying treats for the cat and enjoying talks about the animal and all its little ways. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife �� the days have more light and color. The novel brims with new small joys and many moments of staggering poetic beauty, but then something happens��.

As Kenzaburo Oe has remarked, Takashi Hiraide’s work "really shines." His poetry, which is remarkably cross-hatched with beauty, has been acclaimed here for "its seemingly endless string of shape-shifting objects and experiences,whose splintering effect is enacted via a unique combination of speed and minutiae."]]> 140 Takashi Hiraide 0811221504 Jon 4 japanese, new-directions 3.60 2001
author: Takashi Hiraide
name: Jon
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/11
date added: 2020/08/11
shelves: japanese, new-directions
review:

]]> 895005 Owls Do Cry explores the Withers family, in particular Daphne Withers. When one of Daphne's sisters dies, a crisis is provoked that leads Daphne to a mental asylum where she receives shock treatment. Her voice from "the Dead Room" haunts the novel with its poetic insights.]]> 210 Janet Frame 0807609560 Jon 5 new-zealand 4.00 1957
author: Janet Frame
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/05
date added: 2020/08/05
shelves: new-zealand
review:

]]> 24641871 A Gothic Soul is the most acclaimed work of Czech Decadent prose. Expressing concerns that are unique to the Czech movement while alluding creatively and ironically to Joris-Karl Huysman's Against Nature, the novella is set in Prague, which is portrayed as a dead city, a city peopled by shades, who, like the protagonist �� a nihilist and the "last scion of a noble line" �� are only a dim reflection of the city’s medieval splendor. The man lives in a dreamworld, the labyrinth of his soul giving rise to visions. In his quest for meaning, he walks the city, often hallucinating, while pondering questions of religious fervor and loss of faith, the vanity of life, his own sense of social alienation, human identity and its relationship to a “nation,�� the miserable situation of the Czechs under Habsburg rule, and Prague’s loss of its soul on the cusp of modernity as old sections, such as much of the squalid Jewish Quarter, are demolished to make way for gaudy new buildings and streets. With a history of madness running in the family and afraid the same fate awaits him, he ultimately retreats into seclusion, preferring the monastic way of life as the epitome of unity and wholeness and a tonic to present-day fragmentation. Yet Karásek eschews the mawkish, opting instead for darker tones that play with the tropes and motifs of Decadence while conflating the same-sex desires of his protagonist, the fatalism and futility of such an existence within the social construct of the day, with concerns for the dual fates of his nation and city.]]> 144 Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic 8086264467 Jon 4 czechoslovakian 3.75 1900
author: Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic
name: Jon
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1900
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/04
date added: 2020/08/04
shelves: czechoslovakian
review:

]]> 156188 Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good and evil.]]> 315 William H. Gass 0141180102 Jon 4 american 4.00 1966
author: William H. Gass
name: Jon
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/26
date added: 2020/07/26
shelves: american
review:

]]> 49455 Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In complete retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.]]> 136 Fyodor Dostoevsky 067973452X Jon 5 russian 4.21 1864
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Jon
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1864
rating: 5
read at: 2020/07/17
date added: 2020/07/17
shelves: russian
review:

]]> 319388
With an Introduction by David Nicholls, international best-selling author of One Day.

In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop—the only bookshop—in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors�� lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence’s warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted.

Only too late does she begin to suspect the a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one.

Basis for the major motion picture starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, and Patricia Clarkson.]]> 123 Penelope Fitzgerald 0395869463 Jon 4 english 3.41 1978
author: Penelope Fitzgerald
name: Jon
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/16
date added: 2020/07/16
shelves: english
review:

]]> 22525534 It's in the rain...and just one drop will kill you.

They don't believe it at first. Crowded in Zach's kitchen, Ruby and the rest of the partygoers laugh at Zach's parents' frenzied push to get them all inside as it starts to drizzle. But then the radio comes on with the warning, "It's in the rain! It's fatal, it's contagious, and there's no cure."

Two weeks later, Ruby is alone. Anyone who's been touched by rain or washed their hands with tap water is dead. The only drinkable water is quickly running out. Ruby's only chance for survival is a treacherous hike across the country to find her father-if he's even still alive.]]> 330 Virginia Bergin 1492606545 Jon 3 english, young-adult 3.49 2014
author: Virginia Bergin
name: Jon
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2020/07/13
date added: 2020/07/13
shelves: english, young-adult
review:

]]> 18473997
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.]]> 180 Jenny Offill 0345806875 Jon 3 american 3.90 2014
author: Jenny Offill
name: Jon
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2020/02/22
date added: 2020/02/22
shelves: american
review:

]]> 6553843 308 Don Carpenter 1590173244 Jon 3 4.13 1966
author: Don Carpenter
name: Jon
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1966
rating: 3
read at: 2020/02/22
date added: 2020/02/22
shelves: american, book-club, book-club-my-selections, nyrb
review:

]]> 92574 352 Thomas Bernhard 0099442531 Jon 4 austrian 4.55 1986
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Jon
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/26
date added: 2019/12/26
shelves: austrian
review:

]]> 33159874 473 George Saunders 141049747X Jon 4 american, book-club 3.80 2017
author: George Saunders
name: Jon
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/17
date added: 2019/12/17
shelves: american, book-club
review:

]]> 42185901 Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor—a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town—offers long rants and disquisitions on his own attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town.]]> 558 László Krasznahorkai 0811226646 Jon 5 hungarian, new-directions 4.20 2016
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Jon
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/10
date added: 2019/12/10
shelves: hungarian, new-directions
review:

]]> 2348569
Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J. P. Donleavy's wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American ne'er-do-well studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Dangerfield's appetite for women, liquor, and general roguishness is insatiable--and he satisfies it with endless charm.]]> 304 J.P. Donleavy Jon 5 3.20 1955
author: J.P. Donleavy
name: Jon
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2014/11/02
date added: 2019/11/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 19178 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 0486272664 / 9780486272665

Great title poem plus "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," and twenty more sonnets, lyrics, and odes, including Sonnet: To a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my Infant to me, Frost at Midnight, The Nightingale, The Pains of Sleep, To William Wordsworth, Youth and Age, and many more.

All are reprinted from an authoritative edition published by Oxford University Press. Includes alphabetical lists of titles and first lines.]]> 76 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Jon 4 poetry, english 3.94 1799
author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
name: Jon
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1799
rating: 4
read at: 2011/05/11
date added: 2019/10/03
shelves: poetry, english
review:

]]> 18402954 Donuts are not hip hop music as "hip hop music" is typically defined; they careen and crash into each other, in one moment noisy and abrasive, gorgeous and heartbreaking the next. The samples and melodies tell the story of a man coming to terms with his declining health, a final love letter to the family and friends he was leaving behind. As a prolific producer with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, J Dilla knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. He could have taken them all and made a much different, more accessible album. If the widely accepted view is that his final work is a record about dying, the question becomes why did he make this record about dying?

Drawing from philosophy, critical theory and musicology, as well as Dilla's own musical catalogue, Jordan Ferguson shows that the contradictory, irascible and confrontational music found on Donuts is as much a result of an artist's declining health as it is an example of what scholars call "late style," placing the album in a musical tradition that stretches back centuries.]]> 136 Jordan Ferguson 1623561833 Jon 2 american, music 4.16 2014
author: Jordan Ferguson
name: Jon
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2019/08/02
date added: 2019/08/02
shelves: american, music
review:

]]> 6878264
Weingarten treats the samples used on Nation Of Millions as molecules of a greater whole, slivers of music that retain their own secret histories and folk traditions. Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago would re-emerge anew? This is a compelling and thoroughly researched investigation that tells the story of one of hip-hop's landmark albums.]]> 160 Christopher R. Weingarten 0826429130 Jon 4 american, music 4.05 2010
author: Christopher R. Weingarten
name: Jon
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/01
date added: 2019/08/01
shelves: american, music
review:

]]> 10108380 A CONTEMPORARY DEFENSE OF THE WORLD'S OLDEST PROFESSION

Chester Brown has never shied away from tackling controversial subjects in his work. In his 1992 book, The Playboy, he explored his personal history with pornography. His bestselling 2003 graphic novel, Louis Riel, was a biographical examination of an extreme political figure. The book won wide acclaim and cemented Brown's reputation as a true innovator.

Paying for It is a natural progression for Brown as it combines the personal and sexual aspects of his autobiographical work with the polemical drive of Louis Riel. Brown calmly lays out the facts of how he became not only a willing participant in but a vocal proponent of one of the world's most hot-button topics—prostitution. While this may appear overly sensational and just plain implausible to some, Brown's story stands for itself. Paying for It offers an entirely contemporary exploration of sex work—from the timid john who rides his bike to his escorts, wonders how to tip so as not to offend, and reads Dan Savage for advice, to the modern-day transactions complete with online reviews, seemingly willing participants, and clean apartments devoid of clichéd street corners, drugs, or pimps.

Complete with a surprise ending, Paying for It provides endless debate and conversation about sex work and will be the most talkedabout graphic novel of 2011.]]> 292 Chester Brown 1770460489 Jon 3 american, graphic-novel 3.61 2011
author: Chester Brown
name: Jon
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/22
date added: 2019/07/22
shelves: american, graphic-novel
review:

]]> 23346410
Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those she sees from her window. As the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the world outside seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of someone peeing on a balcony, or a man fleeing his pursuers.

A General Theory of Oblivion is a perfectly crafted, wild patchwork of a novel, playing on a love of storytelling and fable.]]> 245 José Eduardo Agualusa 1846558476 Jon 5 3.87 2012
author: José Eduardo Agualusa
name: Jon
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/12
date added: 2019/07/12
shelves: archipeligo, book-club, portuguese
review:

]]> 20726614 really is. It's the side wind of a one-of-a-kind mind. It's a rare gift that gives as well as takes.It's a record that keeps going around and around.]]> 437 Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson 1410466493 Jon 4 american, memoir, music 4.12 2013
author: Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
name: Jon
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2019/06/06
date added: 2019/06/06
shelves: american, memoir, music
review:

]]>