Talk not with scorn of Authors- it was the chattering of the Geese that saved the Capitol. Coleridge
www.seanenright.com
seanenright.blogspot.com
Friday, July 01, 2022
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
Thursday, June 16, 2022
Tuesday, June 07, 2022
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Really enjoyed reading this, after some trepidation after reading alot of the review. As a follow up to the stunning ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, it pales somewhat, as it is more in the line of CLOUD ATLAS, a blurring interwoven text about some humans shared devotion for a fragmentary Greek text. It covers from Ancient Greece until some time well in the future aboard an interplanetary spaceship, and visits the sacking of Constaninople,1950s-to-present day Idaho, a murderous climate activist, and the Korean War.
Quicksand by Steve Toltz
Shades of PANAMA by Thomas McGuane, one of my favorite novels. Toltz's style is frenetic, brilliant and blinding: he stacks up aphorisms and similes like nobody's business, it's too packed with great lines to quote here with any comprehensiveness.
the deep waters of everything lived through
were backed up in the soul. . . I can't answer! (91)
"What is?"
"Your life."
if I run into it. I say: I've racked my narrative
for signs of hubris. (255)
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
Strange unsettling sort of boring story of a construction worker who used to be a soccer goalie and gets fired and murders a woman. Rest of narrative follows his unraveling sanity - I guess - as language and time become unreal to him and he waits to be apprehended. Sort of remember seeing a film version of it in college.
The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy
An amazing experience of a novel, about the imagined life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G.E. Moore. Duffy's writing seems almost out of another time, recalling Henry James, and even some of the Victorians. It's a dense, moving, obsessive book
Monday, March 21, 2022
The Catherine Wheel by Jean Staffod
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Can't believe I had never read this. Marvelous. Driven to it by its echoes in the Thomas McGuane short story "Fugitives."
Monday, March 14, 2022
Monday, March 07, 2022
Monday, February 28, 2022
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carre
Mind numbingly long and complicated acting-within-acting-within-terror-cells. May or may not finish it. Awesome early 1970s Greece slutty hippies, which is something.
Friday, February 18, 2022
Sunday, February 13, 2022
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy By Leslie Brody
Interesting if thin biography of Fitzhugh. There was an earlier one from 1991 by Virginia Wolf that is apparently more scholarly. This one is decidedly not. Brody does a lot of speculation about what Harriet might have done, whom she might have, how she might have felt. She does talk to secondary sources, and has some access to correspondence. Her lifelong correspondence with James Merrill and Peter Taylor would be interesting to see. But the photo section is paltry and it seems like an entire book could be made of Fitzhugh's paintings, drawings, and illustrations. Each published book is plot summarized at length. There's a lengthy afterword explaining the tight control over her unpublished work exercised by her estate (which I would have preferred as a preface). And Fitzhugh's final years are covered in snap - she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 1974 at the age of 46. And the decline must have been sad.
She drank too much and seemed to suffer from manic depression/bipolar. There is a real sadness behind it all that is intermittently touched upon.
Fitzhugh was a monumental figure in both her revolutionizing of children's literature, and the strong unapologetic presentation of her sexuality.
Thursday, February 03, 2022
The Promise by Damon Galgut
Really like this unusual book. I don't know if it's "the most important book of the last ten years," as Edmund White blurbs, but Galgut's style and voice are unique. Time progresses back and forth, past, present and future, and side by side as well, leap-frogging the point of view from a major character, to a minor character, to a slightly more prominent minor character, then back to a main character - and time has passed in the shuttle of lives.
Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier
Another fascinating urban ethnographic fieldwork study by my old college chum Mitchell Duneier. He spends several years among the sidewalk magazine vendors on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, NY, delving deeply into the culture, commerce and psychology of the mostly "unhoused" African American men who created a micro economic ecosystem in order to maintain their own self-respect.
That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry
Great collection of short stories by the noted Irish novelist. I was drawn in by the final story, ROETHKE IN THE BUGHOUSE, about American poet Theodore Roethke's brief pungent nervous breakdown while visiting the West of Ireland. But all the stories are good.
Monday, January 24, 2022
Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
Like the first half very much but was disappointed with the second which I found hasty, melodramatic, and mis-focused.
Monday, January 17, 2022
Rizzio by Denisa Mina
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
Ghetto by Mitchell Duneier
A very interesting sociological history of the American "ghetto," tracking its origins (at least eytmologically) to the Venetian ghettos of the 1500s, where Jews were sequestered. My old college chum analyzes a handful of scholars since the 1940s who have attempted to quantitize and reason out how the American ghetto began and how it might be corrected. Among other revelations to me, Duneier traces the origin of the concept of "white privilege" to Blauner in 1972.
The Magician by Colm TóibÃn
Excellent if a little muted. I feel ashamed to have never finished any of Thomas Mann's full-length novels, though I continue to return to them, so it was a guilty pleasure to read this novelistic treatment of Mann's life.
Monday, January 10, 2022
Crossorads by Jonathan Franzen
Mixed feelings. Definitely too long. First half sailed past me promisingly, but in second half I got bogged down. Another cast of increasingly unsympathetic characters. The faith stuff was good for awhile, but hard to believe that the parents, and son Clem and daughter Becky, would all think (and speak) so profoundly about their faith strengths and disappointments.
Featured Post
Buy my books.
Buy the books on Amazon, and watch videos of some readings. Please.
-
My son and I saw THE HIDDEN FORTRESS at AFI Silver yesterday afternoon, what a masterpiece! The 21-year old Misa Uehara as the Princess was ...
-
Interesting if thin biography of Fitzhugh. There was an earlier one from 1991 by Virginia Wolf that is apparently more scholarly. This one...
-
Really like this unusual book. I don't know if it's "the most important book of the last ten years," as Edmund White blu...