I wanted to like this book. I haven’t seen the movie, but reviews of the film made it sound campy and fun. I’m usually too wimpy to watch thrillers but I do enjoy reading them, so I thought I’d try the book instead. I have never encountered a protagonist I found more off-putting than Stephanie. I know that the author was intending this to some extent, but the other narrative voices are not much better. I certainly don’t think that an unlikable narrator is such […]
Ugh
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you.
This is a short collection of dramatic monologues by the Irish/French writer Samuel Beckett. So, I need to start off by stating that I couldn’t possibly rate this post because I am definitively ill-equipped to offer judgment of what I read here. I will discuss what I felt about it and the interesting aspects of the production (this is an audiobook) but otherwise, I will leave the criticism to those who know about these things. There are four pieces in this collection. In the first, […]
“It’s concerning you both; for doesn’t it seem odd that Gowing’s always coming and Cummings’ always going?”
So normally, I don’t like serialized fiction. More specifically I don’t care if something were serialized or not. I didn’t really ever like Stephen King’s The Green Mile, and when I read something from the 19th century like a Charles Dickens novel, I tend to try to read it in spite of how it was likely published and created. But this novel, the form of being serialized is exactly what makes it interesting and appealing to me. Or rather, that adds a layer of complexity […]
To make matters worse, the women also dominated all the activity on the upper deck.
I read three Javier Marias books like year, a trilogy that was published in 2004-2010 or so. I think that Javier Marias is an incredibly readable and interesting and brilliant writer, and his weaving together of a kind of crime novel, spy novel, and cultural critique over the course of 1300 or pages in the Your Face Tomorrow books should put him in contention for the Nobel without question, and that’s not even getting at the dozen or so other novels he’s written. In an interview […]