The Runaway Jury by John Grisham
CBR Bingo 14 – Holiday This book was on the shelf on my AirBnb this past week when I really needed something, not very taxing, to read and my books were failing me. I read this on vacation so if I liked it more than I might otherwise, blame that. I picked this up, had no clue what it was going to be about, and loved every stupid second of it. The novel begins with a just expert consulting group group spying on a man […]
The People of Paper by Salvador Plascensia
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
Mountain by Cixin Liu
The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakmi
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson
Homecoming by Eddie Huang
The Matchlock Rifle by Walter Edmonds
Two Logs Crossing by Walter Edmonds
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving
Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
Mortality – 4/5 Stars This is a partial memoir and final notes first published by Vanity Fair and then in book form from the final days of Christopher Hitchens. There’s a part in the middle of every thing where someone tells Hitchens something like “God works in mysterious ways” and Hitchens wonders what is so mysterious about a heavy smoker getting advanced lung cancer. That’s the basic idea here. First things first, it’s not secret that Hitchens is a bit of a bugbear, and for […]
The Healing by Gayl Jones
CBR14Bingo – Star The star here is in reference to our narrator’s work as a manager for a contemporary rock and roll singer, the ways in which this relationship shapes the narrative, and the discussion is elicits. Gayl Jones tips her hand late in this book when one character calls our narrative a “picara”/. In doing so, we learn what we need to know about our narrator and what to do with the Quixotic and episodic novel. If you’ve read Gayl Jones’s first two […]
The Four Feathers by AEW Mason
This 1902 novel about British soldiers in foreign lands is about as melodramatic and clearly pre-WWI as one could imagine. One way to look at this book, I guess the way it’s intended, is that Harry Feversham, on the eve of sailing to Sudan in the 1880s to war, resigns his commission and returns home. He meets up with his fiancé and while there receives a package, three white feathers which stand for accusations of cowardice. When she learns of what Harry has done, she […]
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov
Despair – 4/5 Literature is full of doubles. Whether this means the concept of foil characters who are designed to offset the lead character by contrast like Tybalt to Romeo or Fortinbras to Hamlet, twins and twinning, chiastic structures, repetitions in actions and plot, cycles of violence etc, or like literal doubles. In most of these stories where are actual double occurs we will get something like Mr Hyde as shadow-self to Dr Jeckyll or a trickster figure like in Dostoyevsky’s The Double and the […]
Persuasion by Jane Austen
My favorite Jane Austen and my first one too. I also think that I might be teaching this book to AP students this year. It’s not as funny as some of the others, but it’s also not as long, but Anne Elliot is such a whole, wonderful character who goes through a trying, if fruitful, emotional journey in this novel that is so well-rendered that it’s impossible to dislike. In the first few chapters of the book, we first meet Anne’s father, who is in […]