It’s hard to properly write the title for this memoir in the boxes on this site because it has a comma in the title and that gums up the works a little. The title is an apostrophe, telling Memory to Speak. I don’t mean to explain that to you, but for all the years I knew of this title and thought about reading it, I couldn’t ever make sense of it. I read Harry Potter in high school and didn’t the joke of Diagon Alley […]
Triptych of no real consequence
Philip Roth – The Breast 2/5 Cynthia Ozick – The Shawl 4/5 Vladimir Nabokov – The Eye 3/5 So these three short novels or novellas don’t really have much to do with one another ostensibly, but I read them one after the other on a Friday sick day and thought a little about their connections or rather what connections I might draw on them. To start, I will tell you what each one of them is about. The Shawl starts off in the […]
It’s gross you guys.
Lolita is a narrative that permeates pop culture, in advertisements, references and romanticizing of things that are not okay. This narrative probably originates from the 1997 film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons: When I was a teenager this novel was a way to live out my own sexuality and confused feelings about adults around me. These adults were mostly male teachers making Humbert Humbert the perfect stand-in. However engaging with this story as an adult is a bit different. It’s gross you guys. Lolita is […]
A fantastic farrago of evil
This book has some serious payoff at the end, and of course a wonderful fake index that clarifies and makes everything right. If you don’t know this one, this is a novel in the form of an academic annotation of a long poem. The poem itself is a 1000 (technically 999) line poem about a pastoral and academic life, love and marriage, childhood, parenting, death. Like what most poems are about, with a kind of erudition and educated set of allusions. The notes on this […]