December 2008
34 posts
“moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of...”
– ian mcewan, saturday.
“in the smile of a self-conscious liar certain muscle groups in the face are not...”
– ian mcewan, saturday.
“the trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be...”
– ian mcewan, saturday.
November 2008
43 posts
100 notable books of 2008 →
“even as you struggle against the numbness of poor recall, you know precisely...”
– ian mcewan, saturday.
“this commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private...”
– ian mcewan, saturday.
jewelry from book pages →
Never judge a book by its cover. Originally inspired by a poem this collection looks at what we choose to hide about ourselves and what we reveal to others, a secretive library where things are not always what they seem. Books are interesting to Betty in that, irrespective of the text within them, they tell stories. They carry inscriptions, scents and tell the tale of how they have been treated,...
Question of the day:
52books:
Should I finish book 52 before or after Thanksgiving?
i think books go perfectly well with pumpkin pie :)
1 tag
kafka on the shore.
after wrapping up my second murakami book, i’m embarrassed that as a self-proclaimed lit nerd that it took me so long to discover him.
kafka on the shore navigates the world of kafka tamura, a fifteen year old boy whose father informed him as a child that he was destined to kill his father, and sleep with his mother and sister—a la Oedipus. to escape the curse, kafka flees his hometown and...
“time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. you keep on moving, trying...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
“every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says, after the...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
“things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
“it was the ancient mesopotamians. they pulled out animal...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
calling all bibliophiles and bookworms:
is twilight worth reading? i held out on harry potter for years, refusing to jump on the bandwagon, and when i did…it was love. i’m debating trying out twilight but i need some educated opinions.
email me, por favor.
“what Chekhov was getting at is this: necessity is an independent concept. it has...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
“you’re right,” Oshima says. “that’s how stories...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
“from my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
the joy of english →
A self-diagnosed hyperlexic since first grade, Blount hangs out in dictionaries the way other writers hang out in bars. It’s easy to picture him making a pub crawl of the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (unabridged), the Random House unabridged dictionary and especially the American Heritage Dictionary, where he helps tend bar as a member of its official...
“we’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like...”
– haruki murakami, kafka on the shore.
housekeeping, marilynne robinson.
my bottom line: skip it.
robinson’s writing style is pared down, which i usually consider to be a good thing. however, i didn’t feel any real connection to the story or characters until maybe the last five pages when the narrator finally became less of a vehicle for telling the story and more of an actual person. the narrator was so emotionally detached that as a reader i had a hard...
“Literature is more susceptible to these doubts than music or the visual arts,...”
– jonathan lethem, review of 2666
2666 →
currently reading:
this time of year, curling up in my bed or at a coffee shop with a mug of tea and a good book is just about all i need to be content.
reading now:
the last few pages of housekeeping, marilynne robinson.
kafka on the shore, haruki murakami
on deck:
drown, junot diaz
the witches of eastwick, john updike
saturday, ian mcewan
the little disturbances of man, grace paley
suggestions? send me an...
kafka knew office hell →
A new book is coming out called Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Whoa, did Kafka experience the uncertainty of layoffs, and that annoying co-worker who keeps popping his head over the cubicle partition? As Bookninja put it, “Kafkaesque bureaucratic bewilderment existed pre-Kafka.”—gawker
“perhaps memory is the seat not only of prophecy but of miracle as well.”
– marilynne robinson, housekeeping.
“there is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at a...”
– marilynne robinson, housekeeping.
“to crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. for when does a...”
– marilynne robinson, housekeeping.
michael crichton passes away →
After a long battle with cancer, science fiction’s biggest crossover novelist Michael Crichton died today. Though the lanky Harvard graduate was most well known for his 1990 novel Jurassic Park, he leaves behind a sometimes controversial legacy of investigation into the most prominent scientific issues of our time.—alex carnevale
“and since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses...”
– marilynne robinson, housekeeping.
“everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the...”
– marilynne robinson, housekeeping.