CW: assault A starkly different recommendation–from The Pale King to this, which couldn’t be more different if you’d tried. There’s more plot in a single paragraph of the latter than in all of the former’s million odd pages…and this book isn’t short by any means. This is a fictionalized reconstruction of the Norwegian settlers of Greenland of the fourteenth century, written in the style of one of those old sagas originally passed down through oral tradition. It’s actually quite hard to sell this one, and I think […]

“From the outside it was clear that the building known generally as “Old Meats” had eased under the hegemony of horticulture department.” This is a very mid-1990s novel about life on a midwestern college campus. Specifically we are at “Moo U”, which is obviously not it’s real name, but we go with it. We end up with several clues throughout the opening section here about the level of irony and farce we’re suppose to be reading into this novel. For example, nearly every building on […]

“Two months after her husband died on November 12, 1851, Eliza Ripple stopped writing letters to her mother back in Kalamazoo.” This is the newest novel by Jane Smiley, who has now written a million of them. She’s not Joyce Carol Oates, but she’s been publishing for more than 40 years now, and has been pretty prolific. In general, I liked this novel, but it felt a little thin at times, but more so a little underdeveloped. I don’t mean the writing is bad at […]