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Readings about Reading

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco

The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas Foster

Twenty Five Books that Shaped America by Thomas Foster

How to Read Noves like a Professor by Thomas Foster

Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick

How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom

May 22, 2022 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods – 5/5 Stars One of the most exciting things to feel, for me at least, is when reading becomes not just an act of enjoying and engaging with a story or ideas, but an active hunt for meaning and understanding. I am a big proponent of doing the reading you want to do and mostly letting other people do the reading they want to do. Eco describes early in this collection of six lectures on reading (and specifically on […]

Sci Fi/Cosmic Horror by Peter Clines

14 by Peter Clines

The Fold by Peter Clines

Dead Moon by Peter Clines

Terminus by Peter Clines

Paradox Bound by Peter Clines

May 20, 2022 by vel veeter 1 Comment

14 4/5 I am reading the four books of the Threshold series and I am convinced of a few things. It would make a solid multi-season tv show, where there’s some good juicy roles here, there’s a lot of variety and suspense built into it, and there’s some solid connectivity between the books, but also distinction both in the plot and the storytelling. The books kind of already read like someone who tried to get a job as a screenwriter but then turned to novels. […]

Against the Day

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

May 13, 2022 by vel veeter 1 Comment

Gravity’s Rainbow is a truly difficult book to read, mostly because of the complex language that often clips itself off at various times, paragraphs that go on and on, and a self-referential style that is both dense and ambiguous. To say that this book is significantly easier to read is a way of saying that the language is much more fluent, recognizable, and less dense. That’s not to say that this book is in fact easy to read because while the language is more accessible, […]

A Severed Head

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

May 13, 2022 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

You can’t call a novel a quintessential Iris Murdoch novel because her novels often take one of a number of possible forms. Of the forms: a group of adults who fall in and out of love with each other and a lot of drinking, smoking, sending of letters, and philosophizing occurs. Here we begin with Martin Lynch-Gibbon who married to Antonia, friends with Palmer Anderson (her psychiatrist), brother to Alexander, and having an affair with Georgie. He thinks things are more or less going fine […]

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

May 13, 2022 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Yes, those Netanyahus. The narrator of this book is a kind of version of Harold Bloom, even though we’re told not to think that, but I do anyway. Professor Blum is an Americanist history professor in a western New York college. He’s approached by department chair asking him to be on a hiring committee for a new position for a medievalist. He gets the (accurate) impression that he’s only being asked because the clearly preferred candidate is a highly-recommended Medieval Judaism scholar named Benzion Netanyahu […]

Read Until You Understand

Read until You Understand by Farrah Jasmine Griffin

May 12, 2022 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This book is several different books overlapped together, which the author tells us in the opening pages. It’s partly a memoir, telling the story of Farah Jasmine Griffin growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with parents heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, especially the elements of the movement that intersect with radical writers and thinkers (even though as we are told they were a little too old to be involved in the Black Panthers, just as a way of placing them) […]

narfna on And now, jump back hundreds and hundreds of years…#BlameMalin on this one for me, too, because she literally sent me a copy.
narfna on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”That's gotta be the new headcanon.
drmllz on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”I like to think the wife packs Hastings off to England to hang out with Poirot and enjoys having a whole ranch to herself...
Emmalita on And now, jump back hundreds and hundreds of years…Oh yay! Another #BlameMalin victim. That was an expensive miscommunication. I'm glad your grandmother is ok.
Emmalita on I liked this more as an exercise in boundary pushing for meI have to admit, I really liked this one. But Anita Kelly's whole vibe just works for me. I do have a couple of non...

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