Wes's bookshelf: all

Wes's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 16 Apr 2025 04:37:36 -0700 60 Wes's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Blood Meridian 7117831 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 355 Cormac McCarthy 0330544586 Wes 0 currently-reading 4.05 1985 Blood Meridian

author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Wes
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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]]> 1982, Janine 1251167 1982, Janine is a liberal novel of the most satisfying kind. Set over the course of one night inside the head of Jock McLeish, an aging, divorced, alcoholic, insomniac supervisor of security installations, as he tipples in the bedroom of a small Scottish hotel, it makes an unanswerable case that republicanism is a state of absolute spiritual bankruptcy. For McLeish, being a Republican is something he has to cure himself of, every bit as much as his alcoholism and his Sado-Masochistic fantasizing, if he is to become a human being again.

1982, Janine explores themes of male need and inadequacy through the lonely, darkly comic, alcohol-fueled fantasies of its protagonist. An unforgettably challenging book about power and powerlessness, men and women, masters and servants, small countries and big countries, Alasdair Gray's exploration of the politics of pornography has lost none of its power to shock.]]> 352 Alasdair Gray 0224020943 Wes 0 4.14 1984 1982, Janine

author: Alasdair Gray
name: Wes
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/02
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]]> Of Time and the River 29350644 Genius, starring Jude Law, Colin Firth, Dominic West and Nicole Kidman.

It is 1920 and Eugene Gant leaves the American South for Harvard, New York and Europe, determined to make his way as a writer. On the boat home, he meets Esther Jack, the woman who is to dominate his life. Autobiographical, vital and passionate, Wolfe's second novel blazes with energy and life.

Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is also now available in Penguin Classics. Together, the two novels tell the story of Eugene Gant, Wolfe's fictional alter-ego, as he grows up in a dysfunctional family in the American South and discovers his true vocation as a writer.

This new edition includes an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian.]]> 1040 Thomas Wolfe 0241215765 Wes 0 currently-reading 4.22 1935 Of Time and the River

author: Thomas Wolfe
name: Wes
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1935
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> Never Let Me Go 6334 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Wes 0 3.85 2005

author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Wes
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> Providence 54101443 752 John Piper 1433568349 Wes 0 4.70

author: John Piper
name: Wes
average rating: 4.70
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> Melvill 59551455
A partir de las figuras de Herman Melville y de su padre Allan Melvill, surcando días de infancia junto al lecho de un alucinado y noches de escritor crepuscular que ya no empuña pluma ni arpón, Melvill sale a la caza del enigma de la siempre huérfana vocación literaria, del legado del estigma familiar, de los navegantes de la ficción y de los náufragos de la realidad.]]> 288 Rodrigo Fresán 8439739478 Wes 0 3.76 2022 Melvill

author: Rodrigo Fresán
name: Wes
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/23
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The latest episode of Literary Ramblings focuses in on Fresán's bizarre "biography" on Melville. Listen here:
]]> <![CDATA[The Life of Samuel Johnson (In Six Volumes)]]> 49952002
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.]]> 3043 James Boswell Wes 0 0.0 1790 The Life of Samuel Johnson (In Six Volumes)

The Life of Samuel Johnson (In Six Volumes)

author: James Boswell
name: Wes
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1790
rating: 0
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]]> The City of God 1684
This Modern Library edition is a complete and unabridged version of the 1871 Marcus Dods translation.]]> 905 Augustine of Hippo 0679783199 Wes 0 currently-reading 3.66 426 The City of God

author: Augustine of Hippo
name: Wes
average rating: 3.66
book published: 426
rating: 0
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]]> The Second World War 25587
1. The Gathering Storm
2. Their Finest Hour
3. The Grand Alliance
4. The Hinge of Fate
5. Closing the Ring
6. Triumph and Tragedy]]> 4736 Winston S. Churchill 039541685X Wes 0 to-read, owned-pricey 4.48 The Second World War

author: Winston S. Churchill
name: Wes
average rating: 4.48
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium]]> 62366632 1160 Anthony Kaldellis 0197549322 Wes 0 to-read 4.55 2023

The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium

author: Anthony Kaldellis
name: Wes
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> Venus and Adonis 361015 16 William Shakespeare 3150182557 Wes 0 shakespeare-other 3.64 1592

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1592
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: shakespeare-other
review:

]]> The Two Noble Kinsmen 6948572 - Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

- Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

- Scene-by-scene plot summaries

- A key to famous lines and phrases

- An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language

- Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books

- An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play

]]> 320 William Shakespeare 0671722964 Wes 3 shakespeare-comedies 3.14 1614 The Two Noble Kinsmen

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.14
book published: 1614
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: shakespeare-comedies
review:

]]> The Stand 149267 For hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King's gift. And those who are listening to The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work of the imagination that takes on the issues that will determine our survival.]]> 1152 Stephen King Wes 4 4.35 1978

author: Stephen King
name: Wes
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, #1)]]> 6324090 96 Lewis Carroll Wes 0 4.04 1865

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, #1)

author: Lewis Carroll
name: Wes
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1865
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
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]]> Animal Farm 170448 Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.]]> 141 George Orwell 0451526341 Wes 0 4.07 1945 Animal Farm

author: George Orwell
name: Wes
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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]]> The Unknown University 16241798 A deluxe edition of Bolaño's collected poetry

Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolaño touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which "you become infinitely small without disappearing." When asked, "What makes you believe you're a better poet than a novelist?" Bolaño replied, "The poetry makes me blush less." The sum of his life's work in his preferred medium, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolaño's gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. "Poetry," he believed, "is braver than anyone."]]> 888 Roberto Bolaño 0811219283 Wes 0 4.18 1993 The Unknown University

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Wes
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
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]]> 2666 3115359 2666 has been greeted as his greatest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness,beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters include academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student caring for her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the desert sprawl of Santa Teresa--a fictional Juárez--on the US-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. Audacious, impassioned and profoundly inspired, 2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork.

]]> 898 Roberto Bolaño 0374100144 Wes 0 4.12 2004 2666

author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Wes
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/30
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]]> Flush 18844 204 Virginia Woolf 0156319527 Wes 0 3.86 1933 Flush

author: Virginia Woolf
name: Wes
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1933
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 3]]> 1162418
“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.�� —George F. Kennan

“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.�� —David Remnick, New Yorker

“Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . T he Gulag Archipelago ��helped create the world we live in today.�� —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of�� Gulag: A History , from the foreword]]> 608 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 0061253731 Wes 4 4.65 1973 The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 3

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 3

author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Wes
average rating: 4.65
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> The Death of Ivan Ilych 18386
How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.
A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.]]> 86 Leo Tolstoy Wes 0 4.12 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilych

author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Wes
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1886
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
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]]> The Awakening 58345 The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the confines of her domestic situation.

Aside from its unusually frank treatment of a then-controversial subject, the novel is widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a work "quite uninhibited and beautifully written, which anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its treatment of infidelity." Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening.]]> 195 Kate Chopin 0543898083 Wes 0 3.69 1899

author: Kate Chopin
name: Wes
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1899
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
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]]> The Two Gentlemen of Verona 82346 The Two Gentlemen of Verona is more intelligible if we think of them as boys, leaving home for the first time. One has a crush on a girl, Julia, though he hasn’t yet told her.

Sent to court to learn to be “perfect gentlemen,�� Valentine and Proteus are derailed by their attraction to Sylvia, the ruler’s daughter. Valentine’s mental denseness does not deter Sylvia from returning his love, but he is caught, and banished, when he tries to elope with her. Proteus’s desire for Sylvia wipes out his former love, leading him into despicable acts that win scorn from Sylvia and wound Julia, who has pursued him disguised as a boy.

When Sylvia follows Valentine into banishment, Proteus follows Sylvia, and Julia follows Proteus, the stage is set for a disturbing ending. But the stage is also set for the “gentlemen�� to take small steps toward maturity.

The authoritative edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading

Essay by Jeffrey Masten

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.]]> 245 William Shakespeare 0671722956 Wes 0 shakespeare-comedies 3.40 1594 The Two Gentlemen of Verona

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1594
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
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]]> The Obscene Bird of Night 181712751 Newly revised and updated by Megan McDowell, and with a new introduction by Alejandro Zambra: at last, the unabridged, centennial edition of Donoso’s terrifying masterpiece sees the light of day.

Deep in a maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of old newspapers. The mute caretaker of the crumbling former abbey, he is hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on transforming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body. Once, Mudito walked upright and spoke clearly; once he was the personal assistant to one of Chile’s most powerful politicians, Jerónimo de Azcoitía. Once, he ruled over a palace of monsters, built to shield Jeronimo’s deformed son from any concept of beauty. Once, he plotted with the wise woman Peta Ponce to bed Inés, Jerónimo’s wife. Mudito was Humberto, Jerónimo was strong, Inés was beautiful―once upon a time... Narrated in voices that shift and multiply, The Obscene Bird of Night frets the seams between master and slave, rich and poor, reality and nightmares, man and woman, self and other in a maniacal inquiry into the horrifying transformations that power can wreak on identity.

Now, star translator Megan McDowell has revised and updated the classic translation, restoring nearly twenty pages of previously untranslated text that was mysteriously cut from the 1972 edition. Newly complete, with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded, Donoso’s pajarito (little bird), as he called it, returns to print to celebrate the centennial of its author’s birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.]]> 464 José Donoso 0811232220 Wes 5 4.38 1970 The Obscene Bird of Night

author: José Donoso
name: Wes
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/10/22
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My 20-minute take on Donoso's labyrinthine, nightmarish novel:
]]> <![CDATA[When We Cease to Understand the World]]> 62069739
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature

A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.��

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 193 Benjamín Labatut Wes 0
]]> 4.10 2020 When We Cease to Understand the World

author: Benjamín Labatut
name: Wes
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/10/15
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The latest episode of Literary Ramblings focuses on Labatut's award-winning collection:

]]> Twelfth Night 1625 Twelfth Night plays with love and power. The Countess Olivia, a woman with her own household, attracts Duke (or Count) Orsino. Two other would-be suitors are her pretentious steward, Malvolio, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

Onto this scene arrive the twins Viola and Sebastian; caught in a shipwreck, each thinks the other has drowned. Viola disguises herself as a male page and enters Orsino’s service. Orsino sends her as his envoy to Olivia—only to have Olivia fall in love with the messenger. The play complicates, then wonderfully untangles, these relationships.]]> 272 William Shakespeare 0743482778 Wes 0 shakespeare-comedies 3.97 1602 Twelfth Night

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1602
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves: shakespeare-comedies
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories]]> 22929586 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.]]> 406 Lucia Berlin 0374202397 Wes 0 4.22 2015 A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

author: Lucia Berlin
name: Wes
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> Death of a Salesman 12898 'For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.'

Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness now exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last?, or a self-deluding fool?]]> 144 Arthur Miller 0435233076 Wes 0 3.57 1949 Death of a Salesman

author: Arthur Miller
name: Wes
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> The Cherry Orchard 4989513 87 Anton Chekhov 142093127X Wes 0 3.48 1903

author: Anton Chekhov
name: Wes
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1903
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3]]> 80468 1.The conversion of Surplus Value into Profit & the rate of Surplus Value into the rate of Profit
2.Conversion of Profit into Average Profit
3.The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
4.Conversion of Commodity Capital & Money Capital into Commercial Capital & Money-Dealing (Merchant's) Capital
5.Division of Profit Into Interest & Profit of Enterprise, Interest Bearing Capital
6.Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground Rent
7.Revenues & Their Sources
The work is best known today for part 3, which in summary says that as the organic fixed capital requirements of production rise as a result of advancements in production generally, the rate of profit tends to fall. This result, which orthodox Marxists believe is a principal contradictory characteristic leading to an inevitable collapse of the capitalist order, was held, as a result of various contradictions in the capitalist mode of production, result in crises whose resolution necessitates the emergence of an entirely new mode of production as the culmination of the same historical dialectic that led to the emergence of capitalism from prior forms.]]> 1088 Karl Marx 0140445706 Wes 0 4.20 1894 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3

author: Karl Marx
name: Wes
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1894
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> Atonement 6867
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.]]> 351 Ian McEwan 038572179X Wes 0
]]> 3.94 2001

author: Ian McEwan
name: Wes
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/31
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Latest episode of Literary Ramblings here:

]]> Falstaff: A Novel 512061 464 Robert Nye 155970649X Wes 0 3.75 1976

author: Robert Nye
name: Wes
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> Imperial 5719302
For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.]]> 1308 William T. Vollmann 0670020613 Wes 4 vollmann, big-fat-non-fiction
]]> 3.93 2009 Imperial

author: William T. Vollmann
name: Wes
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves: vollmann, big-fat-non-fiction
review:
Check out my thoughts here:

]]> <![CDATA[Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1]]> 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 Wes 0 big-fat-non-fiction 4.28 1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

author: Karl Marx
name: Wes
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1867
rating: 0
read at: 2021/03/08
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: big-fat-non-fiction
review:
Wowzer, there's a glut of info to digest here, and it's only volume one of three (four, if you're a purist). Review to follow, once I can muster the gumption to pen a few of my pathetic bourgeois musings.
]]> <![CDATA[The Captive & The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5)]]> 175977 "Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth."
--Graham Greene

The Modern Library's fifth volume of Proust's masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Proust's narrator describes living with his lover, Albertine, in his mother's Paris apartment. He finds himself, by turns, falling out of love with Albertine and obsessing about whom she may or may not love. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. It is during his sojourn in Venice that he receives a fateful telegram from Gilberte, Swann's red-haired daughter. Rich with irony, the story inspires meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection. Graham Greene wrote, "For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary."

The final volume of a new, definitive text of À la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions.]]> 957 Marcel Proust 0679424776 Wes 0 worlds-longest-novels 4.32 1923 The Captive & The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5)

The Captive & The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5)

author: Marcel Proust
name: Wes
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1923
rating: 0
read at: 2016/12/31
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: worlds-longest-novels
review:

]]> Quiet Flows the Don 1076385 1362 Mikhail Sholokhov 0786703601 Wes 0 to-read, owned-pricey 4.07 1928

author: Mikhail Sholokhov
name: Wes
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read, owned-pricey
review:

]]> Winesburg, Ohio 470727 Library Journal praised this edition of Sherwood Anderson's famed short stories as "the finest edition of this seminal work available." Reconstructed to be as close to the original text as possible, Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.]]> 256 Sherwood Anderson 0140186557 Wes 0 3.87 1919 Winesburg, Ohio

author: Sherwood Anderson
name: Wes
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1919
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Pedro Páramo 38787
As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.

Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.]]> 124 Juan Rulfo 0802133908 Wes 0 4.06 1955

author: Juan Rulfo
name: Wes
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/23
date added: 2024/06/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sontag: Her Life and Work: A Pulitzer Prize Winner]]> 43726857
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.

Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.]]> 832 Benjamin Moser 0062896407 Wes 0 to-read 4.30 2019 Sontag: Her Life and Work: A Pulitzer Prize Winner

Sontag: Her Life and Work: A Pulitzer Prize Winner

author: Benjamin Moser
name: Wes
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Locked Room (The New York Trilogy, #3)]]> 435 179 Paul Auster Wes 0 3.93 1986

The Locked Room (The New York Trilogy, #3)

author: Paul Auster
name: Wes
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ghosts (The New York Trilogy, #2)]]> 434 96 Paul Auster 014009735X Wes 0 3.63 1986

author: Paul Auster
name: Wes
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/29
date added: 2024/05/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)]]> 432 City of Glass inaugurates an intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye... It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Written with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense.

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

]]> 203 Paul Auster 0140097317 Wes 4 3.79 1985 City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)

author: Paul Auster
name: Wes
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/24
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The History of Middle-Earth Boxed Set]]> 53857337 This very special collector’s edition brings together all twelve books into three hardback volumes—over 5,000 pages of fascinating Tolkien material—and places them in one matching box.

J.R.R. Tolkien is famous the world over for his unique literary creation, exemplified in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. What is less well known, however, is that he also produced a vast amount of further material that greatly expands upon the mythology and numerous stories of Middle-earth, and which gives added life to the thousand-year war between the Elves and the evil spirit Morgoth, and his terrifying lieutenant, Sauron.

It was to this enormous task of literary construction that Tolkien’s youngest son and literary heir, Christopher, applied himself to produce the monumental and endlessly fascinating series of twelve volumes, The History of Middle-Earth.
��ձ�> 5440 J.R.R. Tolkien 0358381746 Wes 0 to-read 4.74 The History of Middle-Earth Boxed Set

author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Wes
average rating: 4.74
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Recognitions 11786836 956 William Gaddis 1564786919 Wes 0 4.37 1955

author: William Gaddis
name: Wes
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves: to-read, 2021-high-priority-reads
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capitol Punishment: An Andy Hayes Mystery (Andy Hayes Mysteries, #3)]]> 28163094 304 Andrew Welsh-Huggins 0804011710 Wes 3 3.71

Capitol Punishment: An Andy Hayes Mystery (Andy Hayes Mysteries, #3)

author: Andrew Welsh-Huggins
name: Wes
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Invidicum 135735335 1196 Michael Brodsky Wes 0 to-read 4.38

author: Michael Brodsky
name: Wes
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sonnets (The Pelican Shakespeare)]]> 42045 164 William Shakespeare 0140714537 Wes 3 shakespeare-other 4.15 1609

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1609
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/23
date added: 2024/04/23
shelves: shakespeare-other
review:

]]> The Violent Bear It Away 48468 The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousins, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle--that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensues: Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more "reasonable" modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul.

O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos, resulting in a novel where range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writers acutely alert to where the sacred lives and to where it does not.]]> 256 Flannery O'Connor 0374505241 Wes 0 4.09 1960 The Violent Bear It Away

author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Wes
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/21
date added: 2024/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Omensetter's Luck 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 Wes 4 4.00 1966

author: William H. Gass
name: Wes
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/20
date added: 2024/04/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Jane Eyre 10210 Alternate editions can be found here and here.

A gothic masterpiece of tempestuous passions and dark secrets, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is edited with an introduction and notes by Stevie Davis in Penguin Classics.

Charlotte Brontë tells the story of orphaned Jane Eyre, who grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, enduring loneliness and cruelty. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds employment as a governess to the young ward of Byronic, brooding Mr Rochester. As her feelings for Rochester develop, Jane gradually uncovers Thornfield Hall's terrible secret, forcing her to make a choice. Should she stay with Rochester and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions - even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzled readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.]]> 532 Charlotte Brontë 0142437204 Wes 0 4.14 1847

author: Charlotte Brontë
name: Wes
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1847
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/11
date added: 2024/04/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov]]> 8146 Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.

Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
Sounds
Wingstroke
Gods
A Matter of Chance
The Seaport
Revenge
Beneficence
Details of A Sunset
The Thunderstorm
La Veneziana
Bachmann
The Dragon
Christmas
A Letter That Never Reached Russia
The Fight
The Return of Chorb
A Guide to Berlin
A Nursery Tale
Terror
Razor
The Passenger
The Doorbell
An Affair of Honor
The Christmas Story
The Potato Elf
The Aurelian
A Dashing Fellow
A Bad Day
The Visit to the Museum
A Busy Man
Terra Incognita
The Reunion
Lips to Lips
Orache
Music
Perfection
The Admiralty Spire
The Leonardo
In Memory of L.I. Shigaev
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Breaking the News
Torpid Smoke
Recruiting
A Slice of Life
Spring in Fialta
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Tyrants Destroyed
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Vasiliy Shishkov
Ultima Thule
Solus Rex
The Assistant Producer
That in Aleppo Once
A Forgotten Poet
Time and Ebb
Conversation Piece, 1945
Signs and Symbols
First Love
Scenes From the Life of A Double Monster
The Vane Sisters
Lance]]> 685 Vladimir Nabokov Wes 0 4.31 1995 The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Wes
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/10
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]> The Golden Bowl 259020 Henry James explores his favorite themes in this novel �� money, class,��desire,��and the��collision of European and American cultures.

Excerpt:
He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. "My Golden Bowl," he observed--and it sounded on his lips as if it said everything. He left the important object--for as "important" it did somehow present itself--to produce its certain effect. Simple but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. It might have been a large goblet diminished, to the enhancement of its happy curve, by half its original height.]]> 591 Henry James 0140432353 Wes 0 3.79 1904 The Golden Bowl

author: Henry James
name: Wes
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1904
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/04/05
shelves:
review:
For any interested, below is the link to my book club podcast:
]]> J R 11721654 The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor - a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger - and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses - and misuses - whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him - a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures - shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music - burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths - voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios - a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

From the first-edition dustjacket]]> 726 William Gaddis 1564784339 Wes 0 to-read 4.44 1975 J R

author: William Gaddis
name: Wes
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Three Kingdoms (4-Volume Boxed Set)]]> 158770 Complete and unabridged, Moss Roberts's translation provides an authoritative, annotated English-language version of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.

"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." With this characterization of the inevitable cycle of Chinese history, the monumental tale Three Kingdoms begins. As important for Chinese culture as the Homeric epics have been for the West, this Ming Dynasty masterpiece continues to be read and loved throughout China as well as in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The novel offers a startling and unsparing view of how power is wielded, how diplomacy is conducted, and how wars are planned and fought; it has influenced the ways that Chinese think about power, diplomacy, and war even to this day.

Three Kingdoms portrays a fateful moment at the end of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) when the future of the Chinese empire lay in the balance. Writing more than a millennium later, Luo Guanzhong drew on often told tales of this turbulent period to fashion a sophisticated compelling narrative, whose characters display vivid individuality and epic grandeur.

The story begins when the emperor, fearing uprisings by peasant rebels known as the Yellow Scarves, sends an urgent appeal to the provinces for popular support. In response, three young men - the aristocratic Liu Xuande, the fugitive Lord Guan, and the pig-butcher Zhang Fei - meet to pledge eternal brotherhood and fealty to their beleaguered government. From these events comes a chain of cause and consequence that leads ultimately to the collapse of the Han.]]> 2339 Luo Guanzhong 7119005901 Wes 4 worlds-longest-novels 4.40 1522 Three Kingdoms (4-Volume Boxed Set)

author: Luo Guanzhong
name: Wes
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1522
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
shelves: worlds-longest-novels
review:

]]> Ada 88415 Ada tells the life story of a man named Van Veen, and his lifelong love affair with his sister Ada. They meet when she is eleven (soon to be twelve) and he is fourteen, believing that they are cousins (more precisely: that their fathers are cousins and that their mothers are sisters), and begin a sexual affair. They later discover that Van's father is also Ada's and her mother is also his. The story follows the various interruptions and resumptions of their affair. Both are wealthy, educated, and intelligent. The book itself takes the form of his memoir, written when he is in his nineties, punctuated with his own and Ada's marginalia, and in parts with notes by an unnamed editor, suggesting the manuscript is not complete.]]> 626 Vladimir Nabokov 0070457204 Wes 4
Link to my podcast episode on the book:

“Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle�� (430).

Thus the germ of Ada (as delineated by a blackmailed man plotting vengeance), an immensely creative retrospective-cum-journal of Ivan Veen, with annotations by cousin-sister Ada. Nabokov wrote Ada in English and published it in 1969. It bears the traditional Nabokovian hallmarks of wordplay, exactitude in description and nonpareil style; however, this book strays into Joycean territory regularly with numerous multilingual puns, anagrams and sections of dense opacity. Ada is often touted as Nabokov’s most difficult piece of fiction (whether or not this is true, I cannot confirm, having only read Pale Fire and Lolita prior–I leave the ranking to those more thoroughly steeped in Nabokov’s oeuvre).

In brief, Ada is the account of a life-long romance between “first-cousins,�� though the two are revealed to be siblings rather early in the text. Ivan’s father, the prurient “Demon,�� has an affair with Ada’s mother Marina. As children, Van and Ada discover their true parentage while rifling through memorabilia in the attic of Ardis Manor, Ada’s residence. Demon, in particular, wants often to reveal to his son the sordid secret, as on p. 256: “‘Van��,�� began Demon, but stopped–as he had began and stopped a number of times before in the course of the last year.�� Later in the book, Demon explicitly tells Van that Ada is his sister, but to no avail: the two have become inextricable by that point, more that “ordinary lovers or cousins or siblings�� (256).

Their relationship, however, is punctuated by stops and starts, and fidelity is given no status. It begins in 1884 when Van first visits Ardis Hall. Van and Ada are children here, 14 and 12, respectively, but their attraction feels predestined. There is an ineffable connection between them. This blossoming of their romance is marked by the erotic and erratic, the lust-fueled behavior of the infatuated. Van returns to Ardis again in 1888, but the affair is blunted by his suspicions of infidelity–which are fully grounded. These first extended visits and separations set the pattern for much of their relationship, with lacunae of up to sixteen years (termed “cycles of separation�� on p. 478). Around 1922, Van and Ada settle into a more normal, if incestuous, relationship that lasts until their deaths by apparent suicide in 1967.

Ada covers an extended period of time, as noted in the preceding paragraph–roughly 100 years. In fact, Nabokov was working on another piece, “The Texture of Time,�� which began to morph into Ada (and is given its own section in part IV of the novel). The passage of time in Ada is uneven, with nearly two-thirds of the text focusing on early life: adolescence to young adulthood. (Marginal time is spent on the intervening and senescent years.) Because the book is a memoir penned by aging Van, these early years are given a halcyon sheen, the roseate glow of nostalgia, though they are not without the untrammeled despair of youth. No time at all is given to the future; as “The Texture of Time�� insists, future time is sham time. Further still, “We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it�� (599).

Place, as time, plays an integral if confusing role in Ada. It is set on a planet similar to earth–but certainly not earth–called Demonia, or Antiterra. Demonia has no electricity, and the technology in use is both alien and antiquated; the reader struggles to successfully conjure it in his mind. The geography and place-names further obfuscate and intrigue: Demonia has not been divvied up in a recognizable manner. There is also a second planet, Terra, that seems endowed with the paradisiacal, the empyrean. When writing to Van of the deaths of her two lovers, Ada notes that they are both on Terra now (353). It is a planet of “bloodless revolution�� (362), mirroring Antiterra but removing the unsightly blemishes, per exemplum:

“Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young�� (362).

Certainly this is a far remove from Antiterra’s Adolf the Fuhrer. The sister planets are also separated by about a half-century, with Demonia lagging behind Terra; but there are overlapping watershed moments (362).

While Ada has both a compelling plot and setting, the book’s ultimate end is the joy of language. This may seem a trite summation–and perhaps it is both laconic and lazy–but it is justified. Nabokov, like antecedents Joyce and Proust, is more concerned with how the story is told than what the story tells. When thinking of a ginkgo tree on p. 317, Nabokov unleashes a frenzied torrent of words:

“Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical�� voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.�� Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Sailsbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, maree noire by now.��

author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Wes
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/10
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars, rounded down. Full write-up below (my first review in many months).

Link to my podcast episode on the book:

“Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle�� (430).

Thus the germ of Ada (as delineated by a blackmailed man plotting vengeance), an immensely creative retrospective-cum-journal of Ivan Veen, with annotations by cousin-sister Ada. Nabokov wrote Ada in English and published it in 1969. It bears the traditional Nabokovian hallmarks of wordplay, exactitude in description and nonpareil style; however, this book strays into Joycean territory regularly with numerous multilingual puns, anagrams and sections of dense opacity. Ada is often touted as Nabokov’s most difficult piece of fiction (whether or not this is true, I cannot confirm, having only read Pale Fire and Lolita prior–I leave the ranking to those more thoroughly steeped in Nabokov’s oeuvre).

In brief, Ada is the account of a life-long romance between “first-cousins,�� though the two are revealed to be siblings rather early in the text. Ivan’s father, the prurient “Demon,�� has an affair with Ada’s mother Marina. As children, Van and Ada discover their true parentage while rifling through memorabilia in the attic of Ardis Manor, Ada’s residence. Demon, in particular, wants often to reveal to his son the sordid secret, as on p. 256: “‘Van��,�� began Demon, but stopped–as he had began and stopped a number of times before in the course of the last year.�� Later in the book, Demon explicitly tells Van that Ada is his sister, but to no avail: the two have become inextricable by that point, more that “ordinary lovers or cousins or siblings�� (256).

Their relationship, however, is punctuated by stops and starts, and fidelity is given no status. It begins in 1884 when Van first visits Ardis Hall. Van and Ada are children here, 14 and 12, respectively, but their attraction feels predestined. There is an ineffable connection between them. This blossoming of their romance is marked by the erotic and erratic, the lust-fueled behavior of the infatuated. Van returns to Ardis again in 1888, but the affair is blunted by his suspicions of infidelity–which are fully grounded. These first extended visits and separations set the pattern for much of their relationship, with lacunae of up to sixteen years (termed “cycles of separation�� on p. 478). Around 1922, Van and Ada settle into a more normal, if incestuous, relationship that lasts until their deaths by apparent suicide in 1967.

Ada covers an extended period of time, as noted in the preceding paragraph–roughly 100 years. In fact, Nabokov was working on another piece, “The Texture of Time,�� which began to morph into Ada (and is given its own section in part IV of the novel). The passage of time in Ada is uneven, with nearly two-thirds of the text focusing on early life: adolescence to young adulthood. (Marginal time is spent on the intervening and senescent years.) Because the book is a memoir penned by aging Van, these early years are given a halcyon sheen, the roseate glow of nostalgia, though they are not without the untrammeled despair of youth. No time at all is given to the future; as “The Texture of Time�� insists, future time is sham time. Further still, “We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it�� (599).

Place, as time, plays an integral if confusing role in Ada. It is set on a planet similar to earth–but certainly not earth–called Demonia, or Antiterra. Demonia has no electricity, and the technology in use is both alien and antiquated; the reader struggles to successfully conjure it in his mind. The geography and place-names further obfuscate and intrigue: Demonia has not been divvied up in a recognizable manner. There is also a second planet, Terra, that seems endowed with the paradisiacal, the empyrean. When writing to Van of the deaths of her two lovers, Ada notes that they are both on Terra now (353). It is a planet of “bloodless revolution�� (362), mirroring Antiterra but removing the unsightly blemishes, per exemplum:

“Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young�� (362).

“Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical�� voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.�� Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Sailsbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, maree noire by now.��

Passages like these entice the reader with the allure of unraveling such a skein of jumbled language; but the challenge is its own reward. Nabokov treats his audience to a repast of words--the glutton of language may feast his eyes on the sumptuous pages of Ada and be sated.
]]> <![CDATA[Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines]]> 26449917 Hear his voice. Have his ear. Belong to his body.

Three seemingly unremarkable principles shape and strengthen the Christian life: listening to God's voice, speaking to him in prayer, and joining together with his people as the church. Though often viewed as normal and routine, the everyday "habits of grace" we cultivate give us access to these God-designed channels through which his love and power flow--including the greatest joy of all: knowing and enjoying Jesus.

A study guide for individual and group study is also available.]]> 240 David Mathis 1433550474 Wes 0 4.28 2016 Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines

Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines

author: David Mathis
name: Wes
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama]]> 31449002
Rising Star is the definitive account of Barack Obama's formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross

Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted him into the national spotlight and led to his election four years later as America's first African-American president. In this penetrating biography, David J. Garrow delivers an epic work about the life of Barack Obama, creating a rich tapestry of a life little understood, until now.

Rising The Making of Barack Obama captivatingly describes Barack Obama's tumultuous upbringing as a young black man attending an almost-all-white, elite private school in Honolulu while being raised almost exclusively by his white grandparents. After recounting Obama's college years in California and New York, Garrow charts Obama's time as a Chicago community organizer, working in some of the city's roughest neighborhoods; his years at the top of his Harvard Law School class; and his return to Chicago, where Obama honed his skills as a hard-knuckled politician, first in the state legislature and then as a candidate for the United States Senate.

Detailing a scintillating, behind-the-scenes account of Obama's 2004 speech, a moment that labeled him the Democratic Party's "rising star," Garrow also chronicles Obama's four years in the Senate, weighing his stands on various issues against positions he had taken years earlier, and recounts his thrilling run for the White House in 2008.

In Rising Star, David J. Garrow has created a vivid portrait that reveals not only the people and forces that shaped the future president but also the ways in which he used those influences to serve his larger aspirations. This is a gripping read about a young man born into uncommon family circumstances, whose faith in his own talents came face-to-face with fantastic ambitions and a desire to do good in the world. Most important, Rising Star is an extraordinary work of biography—tremendous in its research and storytelling, and brilliant in its analysis of the all-too-human struggles of one of the most fascinating politicians of our time.]]> 2661 David J. Garrow 0062641859 Wes 0 to-read 3.62 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

author: David J. Garrow
name: Wes
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/17
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]]> Eugene Onegin 27822 Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other
characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.]]> 240 Alexander Pushkin Wes 0 4.11 1833

author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Wes
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1833
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/10
date added: 2024/02/10
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]]> Pericles 104813 247 William Shakespeare 074327329X Wes 3 shakespeare-comedies 3.43 1608

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1608
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/25
shelves: shakespeare-comedies
review:

]]> Antagony (Spanish Literature) 60445861 Antagony surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The work, originally published as a tetralogy and now collected into one volume, follows the youth and education of Ra�l Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. Its potent drama plays out through Goytisolo's crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one's artistic vocation. Alternately modern and historical, Antagony displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.]]> 900 Luis Goytisolo 1628973986 Wes 0 to-read 3.33 Antagony (Spanish Literature)

author: Luis Goytisolo
name: Wes
average rating: 3.33
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/21
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]]> The Merry Wives of Windsor 29512800
Merry wives, jealous husbands, and predatory knights were common in a kind of play called “citizen comedy�� or “city comedy.�� In such plays, courtiers, gentlemen, or knights use social superiority to seduce citizens�� wives.

The Windsor wives, though, do not follow that pattern. Instead, Falstaff’s offer of himself as lover inspires their torment of him. Falstaff responds with the same linguistic facility that Shakespeare gives him in the history plays in which he appears, making him the “hero�� of the play for many audiences.

The authoritative edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading

Essay by Natasha Korda
]]> 329 William Shakespeare 1501136879 Wes 0 shakespeare-comedies 3.71 1597 The Merry Wives of Windsor

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1597
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/01/19
shelves: shakespeare-comedies
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]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what �� or who �� is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Wes 4
Check out my book club's podcast on this one here: ]]> 4.03 2023 Prophet Song

author: Paul Lynch
name: Wes
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/28
date added: 2024/01/14
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review:
One of the saddest books I've read in a long while.

Check out my book club's podcast on this one here:
]]> The Merchant of Venice 24128 249 William Shakespeare 0743477561 Wes 0 shakespeare-comedies 3.77 1596

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1596
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: shakespeare-comedies
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]]> Love's Labor's Lost 187450 Folger Shakespeare Library

The world's leading center for Shakespeare studies

Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

Scene-by-scene plot summaries

A key to famous lines and phrases

An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language

An essay by leading Shakespeare scholar, William C. Carroll, providing a modern perspective on the play

Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs.

]]> 291 William Shakespeare 0743484924 Wes 0 shakespeare-comedies 3.40 1598 Love's Labor's Lost

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1598
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: shakespeare-comedies
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gospel According to the Son]]> 96120 The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressing it, “as if I were a man enclosing another man within.�� In its brevity and piercing simplicity, it may be Mailer’s most accessible, direct, and heartfelt work.
��
Praise for The Gospel According to the Son
��
“Quietly penetrating . . . [Norman Mailer’s] gospel is written in a direct, rather relaxed English that yet has an eerie, neo-Biblical dignity.��—John Updike, The New Yorker
��
“A book of considerable intellectual force . . . The writer’s powerful mind works in a specialized way, not by theological argumentation but by telling or retelling a story.��The New York Review of Books
��
“Challenges readers on the religious right and the atheist left with equally rich interpretive tasks.��The Dallas Morning News
��
“An informed and believable work of fiction . . . of what may have been going through the mind of Jesus during his epic ministry.��San Francisco Chronicle
��
Praise for Norman Mailer
��
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.��The New York Times
��
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.��The New Yorker
��
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.��The Washington Post
��
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.��Life
��
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.��The New York Review of Books
��
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.��Chicago Tribune
��
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.��The Cincinnati Post

From the Hardcover edition.]]> 256 Norman Mailer 0345434080 Wes 0 mailer-completionist 3.27 1997 The Gospel According to the Son

author: Norman Mailer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.27
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2024/01/02
shelves: mailer-completionist
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]]> The Dream Life of Balso Snell 138620 59 Nathanael West 0486433897 Wes 0 3.23 1931

author: Nathanael West
name: Wes
average rating: 3.23
book published: 1931
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Miami and the Siege of Chicago]]> 131788 Party conventions have been such dull spectacles of stage-management for so long that this year (I happen to be writing on the day after the closing Democratic primaries) it has been considered nothing less than shocking that delegates might arrive in Denver in August with any more than ceremonial or coronational duties ahead of them. The coverage of such media-events, now almost wholly annexed by the cameras & those who serve them, has undergone a similar declension into insipidity. Mailer could see this coming: having left the Republican gathering in Miami slightly too early "he realized he had missed the most exciting night of the convention, at least on the floor, & was able to console himself only with the sad knowledge that he could cover it better on tv than if he had been there." This wasn't quite true yet: what we have here is the last of the great political-convention essayists, & the close of a tradition that crested with H.L. Mencken & was caught so deftly in Gore Vidal's play The Best Man. You will note the way in which Mailer decided to write about himself in the 3rd person, using for a title the name "the reporter." This isn't invariably a good idea but it generally works in this instance, even when he muses, of himself, that: "The Democratic Convention in 1960 in Los Angeles which nominated John F. Kennedy, & the Republican in San Francisco in 1964 which installed Barry Goldwater, had encouraged some of his very best writing." "They venerated Nixon for his service to Eisenhower, & his comeback now--it was his comeback which had made him a hero in their eyes, for America is the land which worships the Great Comeback, & so he was Tricky Dick to them no more, but the finest gentleman in the land; they were proud to say hello."
Pauline Kael was later to make herself a laughing stock by exclaiming in astonishment that she didn't "know anybody" who had voted for Nixon. Mailer was determined to avoid this mistake in advance, confessing his own ignorance & admitting that in a large Miami ballroom filled with delegates, "there were not 10 people he recognized." The only other person of liberal/radical temper who tried to avoid condescending to Nixon & to Nixonism was that other master of convention-floor prose, the late Murray Kempton.
It was from Kempton himself that Mailer annexed what eventually became the running theme & essential insight of his attendance at both events. "'Politics is property'...[a] delegate's vote is his holding--he will give it up without return no more than a man will sign over his house entire to a worthy cause." More self-evident, perhaps, among the Chamber of Commerce types in Miami (& Nelson Rockefeller with his "catfish mouth"), this extended metaphor worked particularly well--and Mailer did his level best to extend it--in the gaunt, unsentimental world of Chicago stock-yard ward-heeling: that rugged inland coast on which the waves of 60s idealism broke in vain. It wasn't to be "new phalanxes of order" that were conjured. It was the bitter old phalanx of the Daley machine & the Chicago PD. Of necessity, the Illinois chapter was much longer & more intense than the Florida one, but before we shift the scene it is worth saluting Mailer 1st for seeing clearly that Nixon would be "the one" & 2nd for guessing that Ronald Reagan might well be the next one. His method in the 2nd case was equally intuitive. He noticed the clever rebound from the Goldwater defeat while also understanding the purely showbiz aspect. Could that gifted but gruesome twosome of Burroughs & Genet help to explain Mailer's recurrence to the threat of "nihilism"? He hated the war & the police and had contempt for the mobbed-up big mayors & union men who constituted the muscle of the Democrats. But he found Eugene McCarthy brittle & dislikeable, & McCarthy supporters addicted to defeat. Then there was this: "He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on--not as it was going, not Vietnam--but what price was he really willing to pay?" Mailer here was being plaintive but honest, as in the case of the above account of his Lincoln Park funk. It was becoming another of those moments where the best lacked all conviction while the worst...well, we know how that goes. Incidentally, one can't be too careful about making familiar poetic citations. Mailer quotes Edward Kennedy as saying of Bobby's supporters that they had "followed him, honored him, lived in his mild & magnificent eye," & one suddenly realizes that he thinks he is quoting Teddy himself rather than Robert Browning's famous lines from The Lost Leader. As Joan Didion once observed, there are those who say "No Man Is an Island" who firmly believe that they are echoing Ernest Hemingway.
Our Democratic primaries are run the way they are now mainly because of the way they were run then. Mailer dryly watched the roll-call in Chicago & noted that the state which put Hubert Humphrey over the top (Pennsylvania) was the one where McCarthy had received 90% of the primary votes. To touch on another comparison with today's politics, Mailer also noticed in Miami that Nixon had won the nomination in such a way as to also win the election: in other words without splitting or embittering his party. These & similar reflections are of interest & value in a year where the Democratic nominee is, in one of his many protean incarnations, a Chicago South Side operator with a wife whose father was a Daley precinct captain, while the Republican candidate is a repository of something in which almost nobody in 1968 would ever have believed: America's residual pride about its own valor in Vietnam. The almost-closing line of the book is the prediction that Mailer wishes he had made to Eugene McCarthy's daughter: "'Dear Miss,' he could have told her, 'we will be fighting for 40 years.'" He got that right, among many other things.--Christopher Hitchens]]> 224 Norman Mailer 0917657853 Wes 0 mailer-completionist 3.76 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago

author: Norman Mailer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: mailer-completionist
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]]> A Cool Million 2295674 142 Nathanael West Wes 0 3.67 1934

author: Nathanael West
name: Wes
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
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]]> The Day of the Locust 36863726 'He began to wonder if he himself didn't suffer from the ingrained, morbid apathy he liked to draw in others.'

Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist - and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set-designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules.

But when he becomes besotted by the beautiful Faye, an aspiring actress and occasional call-girl, his dream rapidly becomes a nightmare. For, with little in the way of looks and no money to buy her time, Tod's desperate passion can only lead to frustration, disillusionment and rage ...

The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.]]> 192 Nathanael West 0241341671 Wes 0 3.19 1939 The Day of the Locust

author: Nathanael West
name: Wes
average rating: 3.19
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/26
date added: 2023/11/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History]]> 12474
Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer’s seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America’s two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties�� tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.]]> 304 Norman Mailer 0452272793 Wes 0 mailer-completionist 3.64 1968 The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History

The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History

author: Norman Mailer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: mailer-completionist
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]]> Why Are We in Vietnam? 131790 Why Are We in Vietnam? was published in 1967, almost twenty years after The Naked and the Dead, the critical response was ecstatic. The novel fully confirmed Mailer's stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality.

Narrated by Ranald ("D.J.") Jethroe, Texas's most precocious teenager, on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam, this story of a hunting trip in Alaska is both brilliantly entertaining and profoundly thoughtful.]]> 215 Norman Mailer 0312265069 Wes 0 mailer-completionist 3.30 1967 Why Are We in Vietnam?

author: Norman Mailer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: mailer-completionist
review:

]]> An American Dream 131793 288 Norman Mailer 0375700706 Wes 0 mailer-completionist 3.45 1965

author: Norman Mailer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/30
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: mailer-completionist
review:

]]> The White Negro 1075890 Norman Mailer 0872860310 Wes 0 mailer-completionist 3.23 1959

author: Norman Mailer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.23
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: mailer-completionist
review:

]]> The Naked and the Dead 12467
Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948 with the wisdom of a man twice Mailer's age and the raw courage of the young man he was, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.]]> 721 Norman Mailer 0312265050 Wes 0 mailer-completionist 3.94 1948

author: Norman Mailer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at: 2022/01/09
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: mailer-completionist
review:

]]> The Drop Edge of Yonder 31939729 * ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal for Literary Fiction
Rudolph Wurlitzer’s first novel in nearly 25 years is an epic adventure that explores the truth and temptations of the American myth. Beginning in the savage wilds of Colorado in the waning days of the fur trade, the story follows Zebulon Shook, a mountain man who has a curse placed on him by a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he murdered, to “drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you’re dead or alive, of if the unseen world exists, or if you’re dreaming.�� Zebulon sets out on the trail from Colorado, venturing to the remote reaches of the Northwest, a journey that traverses the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields, bringing him face-to-face with mystics and outlaws, politically-minded prison wardens and Russian Counts, each hungry to stake their claim on the American dream. A novel of breathtaking scope and beauty, The Drop Edge of Yonder reveals one of America’s most transcendant writers at the top of his form.]]> 252 Rudolph Wurlitzer 1937512614 Wes 0 3.75 2008

author: Rudolph Wurlitzer
name: Wes
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/19
date added: 2023/11/19
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]]> Howl and Other Poems 6295
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of Ginsberg's finest work, including "Howl," one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California," "Transcription of Organ Music," "Sunflower Sutra," "America," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," and some of his earlier works.��ձ�> 56 Allen Ginsberg 0872863107 Wes 0 4.14 1956 Howl and Other Poems

author: Allen Ginsberg
name: Wes
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/02
date added: 2023/11/02
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]]> The Sorrows of Young Werther 16640 149 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0812969901 Wes 0 3.71 1774

author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Wes
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1774
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/30
date added: 2023/10/30
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]]> Once An Eagle 15818554 Once An Eagle is the story of one special man, a soldier named Sam Damon, and his adversary over a lifetime, fellow officer Courtney Massengale. Damon is a professional who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above self interest. Massengale, however, brilliantly advances by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington's corridors of power.

Beginning in the French countryside during the Great War, the conflict between these adversaries solidifies in the isolated garrison life marking peacetime, intensifies in the deadly Pacific jungles of World War II, and reaches its treacherous conclusion in the last major battleground of the Cold War -- Vietnam.

A study in character and values, courage, nobility, honesty, and selflessness, here is an unforgettable story about a man who embdies the best in our nation -- and in us all.

]]> 1312 Anton Myrer 0062221620 Wes 0 to-read 4.50 1968 Once An Eagle

author: Anton Myrer
name: Wes
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hard Times (Modern Library Classics)]]> 904288
Dickens creates the Victorian industrial city of Coketown, in northern England, and its unforgettable citizens, such as the unwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the factory owner Josiah Bounderby, and the result is his famous critique of capitalist philosophy, the exploitative force he believed was destroying human creativity and joy. This edition includes new notes to the text.]]> 338 Charles Dickens 067964217X Wes 0 dickens 3.58 1854 Hard Times (Modern Library Classics)

author: Charles Dickens
name: Wes
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1854
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/12
date added: 2023/10/12
shelves: dickens
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

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

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Wes 3 4.46 2022

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Wes
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/09
date added: 2023/10/09
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]]> The Disconnected 34035690
“My life was a game, but I wanted it to be taken seriously,�� says Selim, the anti-hero of the novel. But the game has a terrible end with his suicide, and his friend Turgut’s quest to understand this is the story of the book. He meets friends whom Selim had kept separate from each other, he finds documents in a kaleidoscopic variety of styles, sometimes hugely funny, sometimes very moving, as Selim rails against the ugliness of his world whether in satire or in a howl of anguish, taking refuge in words and loneliness.

Under layers of fantasy is the central concept of the Disconnected, tutunamayanlar, literally ‘those who cannot hold on��, poor souls among whom he counts himself, whose sole virtue is that they do not fit into society as it is constituted. He will be their messiah, at whose second coming they will change places with the comfortable of the world. Confronted with this Turgut sees the faultline in his conventional middle class life, and that he too is one of the Disconnected: he takes a train into Anatolia and ‘vanishes��.What could have been a bleak vision of alienation is transformed by the power of language and the imagination.

In 2002 UNESCO put The Disconnected at the head of their list of Turkish books of which translation was essential, warning that it would be very difficult. A German translation in 2016 was well received (e.g., Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 June, found it astonishing that this masterpiece should wait 45 years to appear in German), and needed three printings in six months. But English was the language Atay knew and loved, and his confrontation with literature in English, notably Hamlet and the King James version of the gospels, is a feature of the book. An English translation is therefore called for, and by good chance one exists. Sevin Seydi (the dedicatee of the original) made a rough translation page by page as Atay was actually writing, as a sort of game, and discussed it with him. After 40 years living, studying, working, marrying in England she has thoroughly revised it, and it should be the definitive version.

It is not certain that it would match the commercial success it has had elsewhere, hence this small edition of only 200 copies. Since it is a special edition the paper and binding are of archival quality not often found nowadays in mass-market books.]]> 714 Oğuz Atay 0995554307 Wes 4 4.45 1972 The Disconnected

author: Oğuz Atay
name: Wes
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/05
date added: 2023/10/05
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review:
Review to come in the next couple weeks. This is a weird one.
]]> Dickens 1860789 1195 Peter Ackroyd 0060166029 Wes 0 big-fat-non-fiction 4.30 1990 Dickens

author: Peter Ackroyd
name: Wes
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/03
date added: 2023/09/03
shelves: big-fat-non-fiction
review:

]]> Poems of Paul Celan 1258536
Parallel German text and English translation.]]> 358 Paul Celan 0856462659 Wes 0 to-read 4.36 1970

author: Paul Celan
name: Wes
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sketches by Boz (Penguin Classics)]]> 400885 635 Charles Dickens 0140433457 Wes 0 dickens 3.73 1836

author: Charles Dickens
name: Wes
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1836
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/10
date added: 2023/08/10
shelves: dickens
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet]]> 53097837 ��ܴڰ��ä�� and theorist of aristocratic radicalism. His accusers identify in his ‘superman�� the origins of Nazism, and thus issue an irrevocable condemnation; his defenders pursue a hermeneutics of innocence founded ultimately in allegory. In a work that constitutes the most important contribution to Nietzschean studies in recent decades, Domenico Losurdo instead pursues a less reductive strategy. Taking literally the ruthless implications of Nietzsche's anti-democratic thinking �� his celebration of slavery, of war and colonial expansion, and eugenics �� he nevertheless refuses to treat these from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, he restores Nietzsche’s works to their complex nineteenth-century context, and presents a more compelling account of the importance of Nietzsche as philosopher than can be expected from his many contemporary apologists.

Translated by Gregor Benton. With an Introduction by Harrison Fluss.

Originally published in Italian by Bollati Boringhieri Editore as Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico, Turin, 2002.]]> 1076 Domenico Losurdo Wes 0 to-read 4.63 2002 Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet

Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet

author: Domenico Losurdo
name: Wes
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Rings of Saturn 434903 The Rings of Saturn �� with its curious archive of photographs �� records a walking tour along the east coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.]]> 296 W.G. Sebald 0811214133 Wes 4 4.26 1995 The Rings of Saturn

author: W.G. Sebald
name: Wes
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/22
date added: 2023/07/22
shelves:
review:

]]> The Lathe of Heaven 2930299
The Lathe of Heaven is an eerily prescient novel from award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin that masterfully addresses the dangers of power and humanity’s self-destructiveness, questioning the nature of reality itself. It is a classic of the science fiction genre.]]> 184 Ursula K. Le Guin 1416556966 Wes 0 4.13 1971 The Lathe of Heaven

author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Wes
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/09
date added: 2023/07/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?]]> 6763725 81 Mark Fisher 1846943175 Wes 0 4.20 2009

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

author: Mark Fisher
name: Wes
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/27
date added: 2023/06/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Jacob's Room 225396 Jacob's Room is the story of a sensitive young man named Jacob Flanders. The life story, character and friends of Jacob are presented in a series for separate scenes and moments from his childhood, through college at Cambridge, love affairs in London, and travels in Greece, to his death in the war. Jacob's Room established Virginia Woolf's reputation as a highly poetic and symbolic writer who places emphasis not on plot or action but on the psychological realm of occupied by her characters.]]> 352 Virginia Woolf 039392632X Wes 0 3.54 1922 Jacob's Room

author: Virginia Woolf
name: Wes
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/21
date added: 2023/06/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Breasts and Eggs 50736031
Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.

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

On another hot summer’s day ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless.]]> 430 Mieko Kawakami 1609455878 Wes 0 3.87 2008 Breasts and Eggs

author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Wes
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe]]> 10638 The Road to Reality carefully explores the movement of the smallest atomic particles and reaches into the vastness of intergalactic space. Here, Penrose examines the mathematical foundations of the physical universe, exposing the underlying beauty of physics and giving us one the most important works in modern science writing.]]> 1099 Roger Penrose 0679776311 Wes 4 big-fat-non-fiction 4.16 2004 The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

author: Roger Penrose
name: Wes
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/13
date added: 2023/06/13
shelves: big-fat-non-fiction
review:

]]> The Mudfog Papers 2136286 128 Charles Dickens 086299151X Wes 3 dickens 3.32 1837

author: Charles Dickens
name: Wes
average rating: 3.32
book published: 1837
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/06
date added: 2023/06/06
shelves: dickens
review:

]]> Frankenstein 12974171
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale, conceived after a nightmare in 1816 when she was only eighteen, became a modern myth. It is a disturbing and dramatic exploration of birth and death, creation and destruction, and one of the most iconic horror stories of all time.]]> 269 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 0141198966 Wes 4 3.88 1818 Frankenstein

author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: Wes
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1818
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/31
date added: 2023/06/01
shelves:
review:
Far exceeded my expectations. This endures for ample reason.
]]> <![CDATA[Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)]]> 537809 768 Marcel Proust 067960006X Wes 0 worlds-longest-novels 4.51 1919

Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)

author: Marcel Proust
name: Wes
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1919
rating: 0
read at: 2016/12/31
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves: worlds-longest-novels
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Herman Melville: A Biography (Vol. 2, 1851-1891)]]> 524283 Moby-Dick, to his intimate friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the man to whom the work was dedicated. "Take it all in all," Parker concluded, "this was the happiest day of Melville's life."

Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 chronicles Melville's life in rich detail, from this ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, forty years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness), the savage reviews he received for his next book Pierre, and his inability to have the novel The Isle of the Cross—now lost—published at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction, writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno," and produced a final novel, The Confidence Man, a mordant satire of American optimism. Over his last three decades, while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan, Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet, crafting the centennial epic Clarel, in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne, and the masterful story "Billy Budd," originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem.

Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The concluding volume of Herman Melville: A Biography confirms Hershel Parker's position as the world's leading Melville scholar, demonstrating his unrivaled biographical, literary, and historical imagination and providing a rich new portrait of a great—and profoundly American—artist.]]> 1056 Hershel Parker 0801868920 Wes 0 to-read 4.38 Herman Melville: A Biography (Vol. 2, 1851-1891)

Herman Melville: A Biography (Vol. 2, 1851-1891)

author: Hershel Parker
name: Wes
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Quantum Field Theory and Critical Phenomena (International Series of Monographs on Physics)]]> 160923 interactions. This advanced new edition is based on graduate courses and summer schools given by the author over a number of years. Although there are several good textbooks on QFT, this is the first to emphasize the common aspects of particle physics and the theory of critical phenomena in a
unified framework. The book has been fully updated, with about 50% new material added. Three new chapters have been included: an introduction to non-relativistic quantum statistical physics; a chapter on critical phenomena in non-magnetic systems, polymers, liquid-vapour, and helium superfluid
transitions; and a chapter on finite temperature relativistic quantum field theory. The book can be roughly divided into four parts: chapters 1-12 deal with general field theory, functional integrals, and functional methods. In chapters 13-21, renormalization properties of theories with symmetries
are studied and specific applications to particle physics are emphasized. Chapters 23-37 are devoted to critical phenomena. Chapters 39-43 describe the role of instantons in quantum mechanics and field theory.]]> 1080 Jean Zinn-Justin 0198509235 Wes 0 to-read 3.60 1990 Quantum Field Theory and Critical Phenomena (International Series of Monographs on Physics)

Quantum Field Theory and Critical Phenomena (International Series of Monographs on Physics)

author: Jean Zinn-Justin
name: Wes
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Slow Learner: Early Stories 997948 193 Thomas Pynchon 0316724424 Wes 0 pynchon 3.39 1984

author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Wes
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at: 2020/08/09
date added: 2023/05/12
shelves: pynchon
review:
"The Secret Integration" makes for a strong finisher to this engaging collection--a sad but poignant denouement.
]]> White Noise 6719051 310 Don DeLillo 0143105981 Wes 4 3.92 1985

author: Don DeLillo
name: Wes
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/11
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The Comedy of Errors 82357 Based on a pair of comic dramas from ancient Rome, The Comedy of Errors presents a spectacle of pure farce in the spirit of utmost fun and �� as the title suggests �� hilarious confusion. One of Shakespeare's earliest dramatic efforts, the play abounds in his trademark conceits, puns, and other forms of fanciful wordplay. It also foreshadows his later and greatest comedies, offering students and scholars a valuable key to the playwright's development.]]> 216 William Shakespeare 0743484886 Wes 0 shakespeare-comedies 3.57 1594 The Comedy of Errors

author: William Shakespeare
name: Wes
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1594
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/11
date added: 2023/05/11
shelves: shakespeare-comedies
review:

]]> The Turn of the Screw 12948
A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate... An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls. But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.

Excerpt:
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days - found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.]]> 121 Henry James 0140620613 Wes 0 3.42 1898 The Turn of the Screw

author: Henry James
name: Wes
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1898
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/04
date added: 2023/05/04
shelves:
review:

]]>