A Canticle for Leibowitz is divided into three short novellas, the first tells of a bumbling but gentle hearted monk, who during lent pilgrimage into the desert discovers a fall out bunker. This particular bunker seems to have been the final resting place of a Jewish scientist, dead these past 600 years, who sacrificed his life to protecting books and knowledge from ignorant hordes intent on burning them in a period aptly dubbed the “simplification”. The artifacts found in the bunker allow the monastery the […]
It’s good to be king
“I have touched the highest point of all my greatness; And from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting: I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening, And no man see me more.” Oh boy do I need to step up my review writing game, between a ridiculously long illness and studying for the USMLE exams, I haven’t had a lot of spare time to write. To compound the problem, I was tackling a mammoth of a book, […]
Beasts of no nation
This book broke my heart. I literally had to stop reading at certain parts for days in order not to wallow in despair. Written by a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, in an attempt to reproduce the cadences and rhythm of his native tongue Mende, he here tells the story of the village Imperi which was destroyed in a surprise rebel attack and was sequentially abandoned. Slowly, after years of neglect the villagers return, first the elders, who take it upon themselves to clear […]
Not David Foster Wallace’s best, but that still means it’s better than most.
I’ll start with a preamble, I really like David Foster Wallace’s work, and Infinite Jest might just be my all-time favorite book. I love post-modern writing, not everyone’s preferred cup of tea I know, but give me a fragmented non-linear narrative and I will gleefully jump in. So this is almost hand crafted for me, and yet I am forced to admit that I didn’t care for it all that much. The structure of the book is a collection of non-related short stories, inter-cut by […]