Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually […]
“All Bette’s stories have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”
This is one of those books that come heavy with the weight of other people’s expectations. I genuinely had almost no idea what it was about, only that the people who love it LOVE IT, and I had a general idea that it was pretty weird. The only thing I knew for sure was that Death was a character, because Gaiman spun her off into her own comic at one point. I added it to my TBR when it became apparent that I would probably like it if […]
Drop-kick That Magic Lamp into Mount Doom
Short story collections are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you have to gnaw some nuts and chews to eventually find that chocolate truffle. That said, The Djinn Falls in Love is phenomenal. Six of the twenty-one stories are among the best short stories I have read. Ever. (Jhumpa Lahiri, I’m sorry to report that you’ve been bumped.) The editors’s international ensemble of authors clearly did their research, populating their confident tales with every manner of djinn, jinn, and genie. Some lie in wait in […]
I would like a copy of the ‘Buggre Alle This’ Bible.
This is one of those books that are good when you first read them, but get better as you get older. A lot of satire is probably like that, especially comic satire. I thought this book was funny in 2009, but now parts of it made me laugh so hard I was crying. Plus, I did the audio this time, and it made it even better. Martin Jarvis has a nice sense of comic timing, and his voice characterization is great, particularly for Crowley and Aziraphale. (The […]