Welcome Home – 4/5 Stars If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Lucia Berlin’s collected/selected stories “A Manual for Cleaning Ladies” that came out in 2015. This collection of stories is so good and does a thing that I am always amazed by, transcends the recommendations of readers I don’t trust. It was a hot thing for a little while and this is often a dangerous proposition for readers because I don’t really believe a lot of certain […]
Life is a Cabaret, old Chum
I can’t believe it’s taken me 40 years to read Christopher Isherwood. Ok, maybe it’s only been 34 years because there’s no way I could have read this when I was 6. But I digress. The Berlin Stories is a combination of two of Isherwood’s novels – The Last of Mr Norris (Mr Norris Changes Trains in this edition) and Goodbye to Berlin. In Mr Norris, instead of Christopher Isherwood, the narrator is William Bradshaw (Isherwood’s middle names). Norris and Bradshaw meet on a train. […]
A Good Book At The Wrong Time
I wanted to connect with this book so much (I loved the movie adaptation a few years ago), but just couldn’t get there. It’s was an easy book to admire and a hard one to love wholeheartedly. Isherwood is no slouch when it comes to prose. The writing is truly stunning. Unfortunately I spent most of my time reading it thinking about how beautiful the writing was instead of losing myself in the narrative and characters. A Single Man is light on plot and instead […]