The Castle of Crossed Destinies – 2/5 Stars I knew it. I knew I was not going to like this one, and I made it about 20 pages in before I truly understood that the book was going to annoy. That’s a lot of annoying for a book that’s only 120 pages long. So the setup of this novel is that a group of people find themselves holed up in a tavern and unable to speak. This setup, which plays upon especially The Decameron, but […]
End in Sight
Burden of Proof – 3/5 Stars So this is a second of the “Kindle County” series books that Turow has been publishing over the course of the last 30 years. I reviewed the first one a few months back. This a “legal thriller” and starts with Sandy Stern (of Argentine Jewish descent, which comes up, repeatedly) finding his wife dead in the garage of a possible suicide. There is a note but few clues as to what might have happened. Over the course of the […]
The Inception of books (have a totem handy).
Back in college, my literary theory professor talked my class through a whole bunch of theoretical approaches to texts, including historical criticism, formalism/New Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism, etc., etc. You get the idea. At one point, he mentioned that Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller would make an excellent companion to our semester. I bought the book and promptly didn’t read it. But now that I have, I really wonder why we weren’t required to read it in his class. This is exactly […]