The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]
Crosstalk irritates almost as much as having telepathy would
Does anyone else feel guilty giving bad reviews? This is the first actually bad review I’ll make for CBR and I feel strangely guilty. Anyway, with that over with: I thought this book sucked. I mean it just plain sucked (I’m channelling Homer Simpson here). Meant to be a satire examining overcommunication, technological obsession, the constant connectedness of modern society, AND romance and sci-fi novels, the book overshoots and manages to be mostly a satire of itself instead. On top of that, it’s also just […]
Five men, two boats, two dogs, and a troublesome cat.
I came across Connie Willis’ novel To Say Nothing of the Dog and it sounded like something I would enjoy, but figured I had best read Jerome K Jerome’s classic Three Men in a Boat first as it is the story that Willis riffs off of for her own. While Three Men in a Boat was amusing, I grew tired of it and had to force myself to slog through to get to the end. I think I would have enjoyed it more when I […]
Can you hear me now?
I like my alone time. I need my alone time. Accept for rare cases when I am totally immersed in a particular book, I can’t read when there is too much background noise: TV, music, conversations. I prefer silence so that trying to block out other sounds doesn’t constantly pull me out of my reading. I also often have a Pavlovian response to the various dings my cell phone makes. My body’s reaction to cell phone alerts is something like the nonverbal equivalent of Ugh!, particularly when […]