cyber(b)space book reviews

Booklog: Storm

2026-07-24T00:00:00.000+00:00

Fitting book to read during Monsoon in Mumbai. Stewart’s unconventional dramatization of pressure, the interplay of cold and warm fronts, and all the ensuing consequences for man and animal kept me company as my own temples throbbed under the influence of dark, billowing clouds and heavy downpour.

If anyone ever asks you what’s meant by the term “omniscient narrator,” put this book in their hands. This narrator recounts with god-like objectivity: the exhaustive details of the storm’s fallout, the thoughts running through a wild boar’s head before it drowns in a storm surge, and the 400 years of history of a segment of fallen tree trunk that’s about to be dislodged by a gopher’s nest building, among other things. He peppers in enough human drama to keep the story engaging, and he plants the seeds of each small vignette early and lets them unfold in their own proper time over the 12 days of the storm’s lifespan. It all works surprisingly well.

Booklog: The Dream Songs

2026-07-16T00:00:00.000+00:00

I can still remember the moment freshman year of college when a friend showed me the YouTube video of John Berryman reading Dream Song 14. I hadn’t previously encountered poetry that felt so chaotic and alive. So idiosyncratic in voice and mannerism. Once you’ve heard Berryman do a reading, it’s hard to hear the songs in any other way.

Sometime after I saw the video. After college, certainly, I found this collection and bought it secondhand, I think (maybe) from Second Story Books off Dupont Circle in DC. Previously, I’ve used this book as a reference, opening it up and flipping to a Dream Song I already know. Maybe lingering over an unfamiliar one if it catches my eye. Never a sustained linear effort.

Time passes and tastes change, though. Recently I found myself wondering if I actually liked Berryman’s verses, or if I was just feeling nostalgic for the feeling of being young with an undiscovered world of thought and experience unspooling out ahead of me. And so, one thing leading to another, I’ve finally found the time to read through the whole collection. All 385 of the original Dream Songs.

In slack times visit I the violent dead
and pick their awful brains[…]
[DS 88]

Reading through it from 1 to 385 for the first time, I realized this was always the intention. As one critic recently put it “The Dream Songs is, as mentioned, an epic, one that largely takes place in the living rooms, restaurants, bars, and campus offices of jittery postwar America” (source). Only by reading linearly can you see how the individual poems are in dialogue with one another, repeating themes or references or turns of phrase.

That being said, the original 77 are still the most compelling to my ear. The Dream Songs that Berryman wrote after receiving the Pulitzer Prize feel a bit tedious, a bit too haphazard self-conscious about the confessional style. I agree with the critic William J. Martz when he said that “Berryman made a serious mistake in not culling the Dream Songs more carefully” (source). Especially in Dream Songs 78 – 385, you have to sift a lot of dirt to find the flakes of gold.

Fortunately I’ve read a bit more broadly between my first encounter and this full read through. I more easily understand now the purpose of the avatar “Henry” for Berryman. He’s working in a similar vein to Olga Ravn in My Work. Only able to write about things that are too deeply personal, too traumatic, by inventing a character and creating an ironic distance. The poet himself confirms this in an interview from 1967, albeit obliquely and in regards to the work of Stephen Crane.

Similarly, I still find the use of “blackface” and Black modes of speech throughout the Dream Songs to be “uncomfortable” at best. However, I think there’s more to it than that if you scratch the surface. Specifically in its connection to American minstrelsy and the unresolved contradictions of the American Dream at the time these poems were written. Revisiting these discomfiting verses now I was reminded of Bill Orcutt’s exploration of the America’s uncredited cultural inheritance from these minstrel shows for his album A History of Everyone.

John Berryman’s is a frustrating and idiosyncratic voice. I don’t think it strikes the emotional chord in me as strongly a decade and a half after my first encounter. But nevertheless, there are lines in here that I’ll always carry with me.

A best word across a void makes a hard blaze.
Henry reacted like a snake to praise,
he shed his skin
appearing thenceforward in a new guise
so the praise was for his past, not he therein,
saving him from vanity, the mirror’s eyes,
[DS 287]

Booklog: Malone Dies

2026-07-14T00:00:00.000+00:00

Cards on the table, I struggled with this one. Which surprised me because I have read Beckett’s prose and plays since my early 20s and typically found them engrossing.

This is a story, if we can call it that, about the instability of self. Of the self — all selves. Narrated, invented, interrogated. Beckett is here preoccupied with the incoherence of life lived in the absence of meaning, with the false promise of stories to give it order or imbue it with purpose, and, finally, with the inevitability of a death which occurs regardless of the inexpressibility of existence dancing on the tip of life’s tongue.

Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live. No matter. I have tried. [—p19]

Beckett, or Malone maybe, by way of Beckett, that is, is set on confounding the reader’s expectations at every turn. Words follow one after the other, but the moment a form or shape begins to emerge it is dropped or questioned or mutilated beyond recognition. The author denies his interlocutors, at times masochistically, any sense of understanding. The written word, insufficiently expressing the will of the soul, is in the end all that remains.

Booklog: After Virtue

2026-07-02T00:00:00.000+00:00

When I buy a book secondhand, I sometimes like to tuck the receipt into the front cover and leave it there as a sort of memento. This peculiar habit is why I can tell you that I picked up my copy of this volume on July 4, 2015 for $1.41 (USD) at the Georgia Avenue Thrift Store in Washington, DC. I had just moved to DC from Chicago the previous September after completing my master’s degree and I was drawn to the book because I remembered someone in a political theory seminar mentioning MacIntyre’s work as a compelling counterpoint to Richard Rorty’s political writing on liberalism and irony. At the time, I was still laboring under the delusion that I might work for an NGO or a think tank in an area related to my academic degree or intellectual interests. I paid for the book with a credit card, even though my total bill was $2.19 (USD), because paying monthly rent and student loans with my internship’s $10/hour pay meant each non-essential transaction I made throughout the month was a tiny prayer that I would have the money by the end of it.

We live out our lives, both individually and in our relationships with each other, in the light of certain conceptions of a possibly shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us, some seem already foreclosed and others perhaps inevitable. [— p215]

In Ian Shapiro’s online lectures (see “Contemporary Communitarianism” part I & part II) he labels MacIntyre’s project as “Anti-Enlightenment.” And this helped me to locate what about the argument felt so compelling, and where it overlapped with Rorty’s critique of Enlightment (ref. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature). Similarly to how Rorty dissected and dismissed the philosophical project of trying to reason from first principles, MacIntyre’s book provides an honest assessment of the flawed premises and failures of the Enlightment with regard to establishing a rational moral framework. These historically-grounded assessments will never stop being compelling to me. I couldn’t help thinking of this line from Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob:

Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust. [— Books of Jacob, p130]

MacIntyre’s argument is rigorously structured and nuanced in a way that resists a quaint little review for a personal website. His core premise — that all contemporary moral philosophy is built on the misunderstood scraps and ruins of the classical framework of the virtues — was a cogent and overall convincing diagnosis of the incoherence of the present age. His proscribed response to this, i.e. a neo-Aristotelian reaffirmation of tradition and community, makes sense within the context of his argument, but isn’t something I’m ready to accept wholesale. But this doesn’t bother me, I’m sure these are arguments and concepts I’ll return to with more or less credulity in the coming years.

I’ll content myself with jotting down some quick highlights. The structure of his argument, starting from contemporary moral philosophy and working backward to Aristotle, worked well. It’s hard to think of a better way to argue the point.

Notably, Chapter 8: “The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power,” was a great critique of the historical practice and trajectory of the social sciences. I was pleasantly surprised to have it affirm and articulate several points I had been grasping for in previous fiction-writing I’ve done.

I was also delighted to stumble across, in his articulation of the conception of what constitutes a “practice,” what I consider to be a rather effective rebuttal of the current generative AI fever dream we’re living through:

In other words we have to accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage and honesty. For not to accept these, to be willing to cheat as our imagined child was willing to cheat in his or her early days at chess, so far bars us from achieving the standards of excellence or the goods internal to the practice that it renders the practice pointless except as a device for achieving external goods. [— p191]

There are a lot of specialized terms specific to the vocabulary MacIntyre develops for his argument in the above quote, but it boils down to the fact that a mechanism which allows people to participate in the practice of some game or skill without requiring them to submit to or embody the values inherent within the tradition of that practice (i.e. painting a portrait without having to learn and refine the skills required like proportion, composition, foreshortening, or color theory) necessarily robs the practice of its intrinsic value.

All in all, lots to chew on in this dystopian work of moral philosophy — note that I haven’t even mentioned the concluding paragraph and its prescient forecast of the present political doom spiral — and, like I said earlier, I’ll probably be metabolizing its for many years to come.

Booklog: Rogue Male

2026-06-24T00:00:00.000+00:00

This book was name checked several times in Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and that piqued my curiosity enough to pick up a copy.

Ironically enough, my opinion of Bradley’s book has only gotten worse as I’ve sat with it. I’m not sure that I would write the same review today as I did the day I finished reading it. I am grateful to it for this recommendation, though.

Household’s survival thriller was a pleasure to read. The book is distinctly British and somehow also fairly cosmopolitan in a way that feels ahead of its time. There were echoes of Conrad, but I was relieved to learn in the final pages that Household is not so pessimistic as old Joe. The book is also a great example of how to write a self-deceiving narrator effectively. Household does this so well that when the truth is revealed toward the end of the book you feel a rush of catharsis alongside the unnamed protagonist.

The core emotional beats of the story are wrapped up in the insight that the personal is political and vice versa, which speaks to the modern moment in ways I wish weren’t so relevant. At the end of the day, it was a compelling thriller and an interesting character study. Not transcendent by any means, but human with a heart full of blood.

Booklog: The Möbius Book

2026-06-11T00:00:00.000+00:00

When an author experiences a profound change in their lives, it is not unusual for them to turn to writing as a means of understanding the shift. Writing is, after all, a tool for organizing and interpreting the chaos that surrounds us as we navigate the world. Unfortunately in most cases, the choice to publish the writing that results from this process is a mistake — unless your name is Olga Ravn.

Catherine Lacey’s book has all the right ingredients, if we can believe the copy on the dust jacket, for a compelling exploration of this period of her life. She’s a lapsed Christian who was recently broken up with by her longterm partner. A partner who, she realizes in hindsight, had taken the place of Jesus as her personal savior. The fulcrum of her unarticulated faith has vanished unexpectedly, and she’s not sure who she is. Even more tantalizing, the book is organized around an unconventional metaphor for the act of writing stories to make sense of life. The metaphor of the Möbius strip is used to justify the book’s uncommon physical structure. You can start reading from either end, depending on your choice you will begin with fiction or non-fiction. At a certain point, you will have to flip the book over and around and start reading it from the other end until you meet in the middle.

As the blurb says:

“A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s power, and inherent danger.

And yet, for some reason which is both expressible and inexpressible, it all falls flat. (I know that this previous sentence’s interjection is grating and adds nothing to the argument, I am taking a petty jab at the heavy-handed, aphoristic prose that creeps in throughout the book.)

My knee jerk criticism of this book is that it is basically “Eat, Pray, Love” for people who spent their young adult lives on Tumblr. But that’s reductive and needlessly mean-spirited. So I’d like to try to understand why a book which is so compelling in its premise ultimately fails to deliver on its promises. For me it comes down to three major flaws.

First, and most glaring for me, was how underdeveloped the central metaphor of the book is. You might assume that titling the book after this metaphor and structuring the book itself around your own understanding of the metaphor should mean that the metaphor is well articulated and compelling somewhere in the pages, even if only between the lines. You would be wrong.

Writers, and I know I am guilty of this myself, which is perhaps why I’m sensitive to the tendency, often succumb to the impulse to reach for complexity when simplicity would have been more effective. This tendency grows from an anxiety that their insights be too simplistic or facile if they are not associated with something more abstruce. In the case of this book, the only place in the text where the metaphor is addressed explicitly is this line in the non-fiction section:

It was hard, we agreed, to find satisfying conclusions to stories that weren’t exactly stories but rather a set of prompts that resisted completion, a Möbius strip of narrative.
— p118 (non-fiction section)

Astute readers will notice that she could just as easily be describing a circle. But that shape is too simple for her to be considered a “serious” writer. Naming your book “The Circle Book” just wouldn’t rise to the height of literary erudition to which this book aspires.

Ironically, the idea to compare written works to Möbius strips is not a novel one. However, the defining feature of this geometric form is that it is “non-orientable” meaning that within its plane you cannot tell which direction things are facing and if they travel along the plane long enough they return to the same position but are inverted.

A comparable effect is certainly achievable in fiction, and Lacey makes some vague gestures in its direction by including details from the non-fiction in the fiction, but on the whole these little details are sprinkled in rather than used as anchor points. In the end, she does so little with it that it’s hard to believe she explored the concept deeply enough to employ it in the work’s structure. I think if she had we would never be quite certain if we were reading fiction or non-fiction and images and moments would be inverted and repeated as the story progressed. But because of her choice to write the non-fiction in a confessional mode, and compounded by the structural choice to split the two sections in half and point them at each other in the middle, the metaphor and the structure just don’t amount to anything quite as insightful as one would hope. A better metaphor might be two parallel lines pointed toward the horizon, converging on some unreachable sense of self that lies an infinite distance away.

The second flaw is Lacey’s own unchecked egotism in the non-fiction section. I understand that if you write a book about your life it will be mostly told from your perspective and heavily biased toward your own experiences as a consequence. However, the rhythm and structure of her non-fiction is such that different segments of it are literally just her friends and acquaintances sharing horrible things that have happened to them and Lacey finding ever more elaborate ways to make it about herself. I am not exaggerating when I say that at one point she describes a childhood friend slowly going blind over the course of their friendship because of a genetic condition, but then, bafflingly, she ends the story with an anecdote about a moment where he tells her “you are so easy to love” and it comforts her. Again, if you’re writing in the confessional mode, I understand that there is an unavoidable amount of solipsism, its presence in the book is not surprising. What is surprising is that it’s not clear that she is aware of just how glaring it is. She’s just been through a horrible breakup. Her sense of self has dissolved. Other people’s suffering only exists to help her think about her own.

Finally, the book’s content is overly reliant on the reader’s awareness of a catalogue of meta-textual background information. If you hadn’t listened to any of the interviews that Lacey has given to accompany the book’s release, then you wouldn’t know that her ex-partner — who she cloying refers to as The Reason throughout the non-fiction section — is Jesse Ball and that this book is like the literary cool kids equivalent of a Taylor Swift breakup album. You also wouldn’t know that in the wake of this breakup Lacey moved to Mexico City. This is alluded to in the non-fiction section. The fiction section might take place in Mexico City, because there are some touchstones like mezcal and unnecessary use of the word “caballitos” when they drink it, but it’s never addressed and doesn’t quite make sense in the context of the story.

I have many other quibbles. Some at the line level and some with her choice of which stories within the narrative are interesting. But there’s not much value in enumerating them here.

I really wanted to like this book, but as I finished the non-fiction section and was faced with the two blank pages that signal the end of one section and the beginning of the other, I had to take a beat and persuade myself that it was worth finishing the book.

In this context, I’m forced to conclude that Lacey is an author who writes without understanding and hopes that meaning will happen in the process. Not an inherently bad approach to craft, but when meaning fails to materialize you are left with the literary equivalent of a bag of cheese puffs. Fine enough to eat, but ultimately not much more than air and artificial flavoring.

Booklog: Hav

2026-06-04T00:00:00.000+00:00

In my Junior year at the University of Illinois I took a class on Minority Languages which explored the cycles and histories of minority languages and the nation-state projects which hampered, suppressed, or allowed them to flourish. Toward the end of this class, students were split into groups and asked to invent a nation-state with a dominant and minority language and present it to the class. It was a fun project. My group invented an Island nation named “Tirnanog” roughly the shape of Guam and situated just Northwest of the Bay of Biscay. I’ve lost the presentation and I’m hazy on details, but I seem to remember the language being a blend of Icelandic and Irish Gaelic because of two competing settlements, but I digress.

Jan Morris’s unconventional novel about an imagined city-state reminds me a great deal about that project, though her ideas are much more mature and better realized on the page than our hastily thrown together presentation was.

Often times the hardest fiction to write convincingly is also the most mundane. George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, for example, has stretches of incredible tedium where he describes comprehensively the contents of drawers and objects littered across desks within a room. It’s only when you step back and recognize that the author has had to invent every detail that you begin to feel a profound appreciation for the depth of their invention. So too it is with Hav. Morris writes her fiction with the detail and authority of historical fact, which can make the book feel a bit dry at first, but then more impressive as the continuity and breadth of her invention unfolds.

Hav is, as she admits in the book’s Epilogue, an allegory. It represents a conjunction of civilizations, languages, and histories. An overly simplified summation would be to call it an exploration of the “East vs. West” narratives that popped up in the late 80s and have only accelerated in the intervening years. But there’s more to it than that. In fact, many of the descriptions, evasions, and attitudes featured throughout this book brought to mind James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. I think that Hav makes a great companion to that work, and it illustrates some of Scott’s ideas fairly deftly. In particular, the contrast between her initial description of the traditional Roof-Race compared to her disappointment with the artificiality of the constructed track and the campaign of entering the event into the Olympics.

I do think that the work is improved by the addition of the second, shorter visit to Hav. Morris added this section 20 years after the first novel’s release to commemorate its re-issue by New York Review Books. While there was a lot to chew on in the first section, the revisiting of the place and the contemplation of the forces that had shaped — that continue to shape — the country she is trying to understand gave it a complexity that I found much more satisfying than it had just ended on the ominous note of the original novel. The contrast between a country weighed down and complicated by centuries of overlapping history with a theocracy in the thrall of capitalism was keen-eyed and prescient. It called to mind my recent visits to Dubai and Oman.

Not bad for a book I initially picked up because I thought I might learn a few things about what makes for effective travel writing.

Booklog: Notes from No Man’s Land

2026-05-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

My sister asked me what I’ve been reading lately and I told her, “Joan Didion if she had better politics.”

Top tier essays in this collection. Challenging and cleverly constructed in several parts. Not as sharp or incisive for me as Having and Being Had, but that’s a high bar to clear. This earlier work still manages to be consistently better than most if not all of her contemporaries.

Booklog: The Sleepwalkers

2026-05-11T00:00:00.000+00:00

Nothing but respect and admiration for a debut novel that comes out when its author is 45 years old.

This is a very dense and detailed book; or rather, 3 books stacked end-to-end. Each one focuses on a different protagonist and is written very effectively in a style to match. The Sleepwalkers in question are the protagonists. Men who find themselves between great societal shifts as Europe slouches its way toward (and through) World War I.

I enjoyed it in parts and felt quite lost in others. Broch, more than any writer of the time period that I have read, has an uncanny ability to connect the internal psychology of his characters to the broader sociological structures they are trapped in.

That being said, this is definitely not a book for the faint of heart. It’s easy to get bogged down in some of the more abstruse passages. This is especially the case in portions of the third book (”The Realist”) where Broch intentionally breaks up the narrative form to include long philosophical discursions elaborating on what he is trying to do with the rest of the text. It felt a bit like trying to read the novel and the academic literature on the novel at the same time.

As I read, I did find myself wondering how much of Broch’s style and philosophical precision had been sanded away by the translation. Whether the original text is as dense, erudite, and opaque in the original German. But that’s ultimately a question best left to the academics.

I’ll certainly give The Death of Virgil a shot after this, but it will have to wait a few years.

Booklog: Poems, New and Collected (1957–1997)

2026-05-01T00:00:00.000+00:00

I now know — rather definitively — that it was a mistake to be introduced to Szymborksa via Nonrequired Reading. Szymborska’s brief reviews of anything and everything under the sun were clever and quaint, but stacked end to end they became tedious.

Her poetry, however, defies easy description. It was fun to read this large collection and watch her become more adept at her craft with each new collection. I don’t know that I’ve every read a poet, or writer for that matter, that uses such “straightforward” language and focuses on fairly mundane subjects yet somehow manages to be some of the most profound, incisive poetry of the 20th c. And this is in translation! Those of us deficient in Polish comprehension can only shake our heads and wonder at what she must be doing in the native tongue.

I was having trouble articulating the feeling of reading her poetry until a little over half way through this collection, she gave away part of the secret when she wrote the lines:

Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
— p142

This is exactly it. The poems seem light, almost conversational in their directness, but they inevitably sneak up on you and play a trick you couldn’t have expected. Somehow she manages to invert the world you thought you understood.

Take for an example her poem titled “Experiment,” which describes a short film that played before a movie on the subject of a decapitated dog (details are light, you don’t even realize it’s about a dog at first). At first the poem seems to be merely descriptive, but there’s an abrupt turn and the final two stanzas confront you with a profound existential question:

A dog’s faithful head,
a dog’s friendly head
squinted its eyes when stroked,
convinced that it was still part of a whole
that crooks its back if patted
and wags its tail.

I thought about happiness and was frightened.
For if that’s all life is about,
the head
was happy.
— p152

Or, less macabre, when she describes a quiet moment sitting by the river. It’s a premise which might risk falling into the rote clichés of romanticism, but in her hands it instead becomes a stepping off point for a profound meditation on the “tapestry of circumstance” that is created by merely existing in a single space and a given time:

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
— p226

I have a habit of dog-earing a page if I think something is particularly good and I’ll want to come back and reference it later. When I finished this collection, I realized I had dog-eared nearly a dozen pages and written “wow,” “perfect,” and “oh my god.” in the margins countless more times.

If you’re reading this review, you shouldn’t be content just to read these choice excerpts. You can’t truly understand what it’s like to read a Szymborska poem until you’ve read one in its entirety, re-read it, stared into empty space, and re-read it a third time trying to understand what it is about her simple words that keeps them gnawing at the edges of your mind long after.

Booklog: The Vaster Wilds

2026-04-01T00:00:00.000+00:00

My book club selected this and I was happy for the excuse to read Groff for the first time.

A few interesting things going on here. She’s writing a period piece and, in what felt like a nod to Cormac McCarthy, doing her best to narrate in the idiolect that might feel most familiar to her protagonist. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult thing to do and only gets harder the further back in time you go. So while there is some truly beautiful and distinct language here, she sometimes loses her ear for it and drops in a more modern turn of phrase that can be jarring for the reader.

Plot-wise this is very much an extended riff on a Jack London story. Impossible to read certain passages without thinking of To Build a Fire. However, whereas London’s story concludes predictably and makes a point about the folly of rugged individualism and masculinity in the face of nature, Groff frames it more as the purposeful rejection of the world by her female protagonist. Her fleeing into the wilderness is her first act of asserting her own agency, almost a moment of self-realization. When the end inevitably comes, Groff chooses to emphasize her place in the great cycle of nature and the enduring legacy that her body — the body of a nobody who dies anonymously in the American wilds — will leave.

At the end of the day, did I enjoy this book? I don’t think so. But that’s not the point. Do I prefer it to London’s work? I’m not sure. But I appreciate the care and effort that went into it and it’s nice to read something that subverts a well known genre convention in some interesting ways.

Booklog: 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt

2026-03-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

First things first, the American publisher did Juliet Barker dirty by including the phrase “Peasants’ Revolt” in the subtitle of this edition. In her own introduction, page xiii of the preface, she writes “this was not a ‘peasants’ revolt’ at all.” The original title of the book as it was published in the UK is “England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381,” and this is both a much better title and a better reflection of the content of the historical argument she makes.

Okay, now to the heart of it, this book bummed me out. The saying is “don’t meet your heroes,” but Barker’s work makes me want to coin a new phrase along the lines of “don’t read rigorously researched histories of mythologized events.”

Most striking, for me, was that, while John Balle features so prominently in the popular mythology of these events, he very likely was a marginal figure who was executed to make an example. The lionized figure most are familiar with today is, ironically, the fault of the chroniclers of the day who found a convenient scapegoat and justification for the uprising in an excommunicated priest whose inflammatory rhetoric was well known at the time.

Another interesting point was that, in hindsight, the organization, resistance, and simmering discontent were all apparent in the years, decades even, prior to the events of the summer of 1381.

Unfortunately for non-academic readers, Barker’s unwillingness to make any assertion that can’t be backed up and corroborated by at least two trustworthy primary sources can lead to some fairly dry reading. The book has few heroes and an incredible amount of hedging. Hardly anything can be known for certain unfortunately. Because the myths of the rebel leaders are not verifiable or consistent, a great deal of the text is spent enumerating the known actions of the rebel groups and the property they destroyed or the records they burned. Thrilling stuff.

And while my sensibilities as a reader and appreciator of dramatic tension and poetic imagery will always be disappointed that her work rigorously disproves Balle’s sermon at Blackheath and Richard II’s condemnation of the rebels at Waltham, I do appreciate that this history lends credence to the fact that this was a well organized, diverse (geographically and socially) network of rebels that were able to bring the kingdom to its knees within a matter of days.

Even though the immediate aftermath of their efforts seemed to show that they had accomplished nothing, their legacy has rippled down through time to be so much bigger than any of those involved could have possibly imagined. There is some small comfort in that, even without the mythic heroes we’ve fashioned for ourselves from the wreckage.

Booklog: Helen of Nowhere

2026-03-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

A very deft and subtle piece of fiction. I had to sit with it for a day and a half before I could articulate what it had done to me.

Goodman lures you in, bit by bit with early sections that might give you the impression that you are reading an oblique take on a Philip Roth-style campus novel. Part way through the second “act,” though, things start to feel off in ways that are hard to describe.

By the time you realize what’s happened it’s too late, you’re already caught in her trap. What you thought was the story of one professor’s brush with cancellation is actually the story of a lost soul shedding the insecurity of its ego and coming to terms with its true, animating desire.

As I read the final pages, I said, “Oh my god” out loud to any empty room and then reread the whole chapter to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood how she had turned the tables on me.

Booklog: The War of Art

2026-03-14T00:00:00.000+00:00

My sister bought me this book a few years back when I told her I wanted to take my fiction writing more seriously. I held off on reading it because, quite frankly, I loathe anything that feels remotely like self-help.

And yes, it is incumbent on this review to state that this bears all the hallmarks of a self-help book: a loosely defined problem, anecdotes and broad strokes about their implications, and the distinct sense that it could have been a 4,000 word essay instead of a +160 page book. Even worse, the book was clearly written to be addressed to writers, artists, and musicians, but Pressfield (or his editor) felt it would have broader appeal if he randomly mentions that his advice also applies to anyone “starting a new business venture.” Call me a cynic but these are different categories. Every time he tried to graph that twig onto a branch of his argument, I resented its presence.

All that being said. I thought it was a fun gimmick to give the book a punny name and then write it in a similar aphoristic style to Sun Tzu’s original treatise. Despite my prejudices, I did find the opening section where he defines and catalogues symptoms of internal resistance to creative work particularly sharp. He calls out several things that I had stumbled into haphazardly as I began committing more of my time to writing. There’s undeniable power in recognizing common pitfalls and neuroses.

Unfortunately the final third of the book leaned far too heavily into his own sense of the spiritual and metaphysical justifications for taking creative work seriously. It felt, to my mind, clichéd and fairly uninspiring. I think the book could have done without it and been just fine.

Booklog: A Visit from the Goon Squad

2026-03-05T00:00:00.000+00:00

It’s really a shame that a group of dedicated internet weirdos have conspired to mutilate the meaning of the word “goon” in the years since this book was first published. Though this fact does echo the book’s central preoccupation with time and change enough to merit a morbid chuckle.

Time’s a goon. — p127

(Little did she know.)

This novel won the Pulitzer back in 2011, and it’s easy to see why. It’s very well executed on a technical level. The themes are clear but deftly executed and subtle when they need to be.

I’ve also seen this book described as “post-modern,” but that feels like a misleading categorization. It’s true that it doesn’t have much in the way of plot. Its story is a tangle of interconnected chords that eventually loop back — or don’t — on themselves. There are an overwhelming number of characters and minute details. There’s a chapter with tennis and another in the form of an annotated celebrity article. Both of which give an unsubtle nod to the preoccupations and style of David Foster Wallace, a postmodernist who loomed large in the minds of his contemporaries. Hell, there’s even an entire chapter in the format of a power point slide deck made by a 12 year old girl. These are all very standard ingredients for a book that wants to be seen as rejecting traditional or mainstream ideas of what a novel can or should be.

But despite the form Egan is ultimately a humanist and a romantic in how she crafts her stories. Her deft use of multiple voices and the creative application of whatever form feels most aligned with a given character flows from her intuition about them and is not merely an intellectual or aesthetic exercise. Form follows function and that, although the form was very much in flux as she shifted from character to character, felt oddly traditional as far as novels go.

Ultimately, the book shows its age in a few spots. The final chapter gets speculative about the future and manages to get it partially right, but it’s specific enough it feels a bit clunky in the parts where her guesses don’t land. At the end of the day, though, it is a masterclass in characterization. Egan inhabits the voice of her characters so well at times, she’ll use an adjective or a noun and you’ll think, well yeah, that’s exactly the type of word this character would reach for.

An enjoyable read despite the ravages of time.

Booklog: Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us

2026-03-02T00:00:00.000+00:00

This was recommended to me by a neighbor. Its provocative title and promise of helping me better understand the social structures in contemporary India piqued my interest enough to pick up a copy.

Joseph has a fair amount of insight to offer. One particularly compelling point that felt new to me is his idea that the chaos of public infrastructure in the country plays an important role in preserving the social hierarchy that exists. He writes:

India’s public chaos, like its architectural ugliness, convey to the poor that the nation is something like them — poor.
[p56]

The book is written in a provocative, polemical tone. Often making a given point with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. While this might be good for selling books in airports, it’s an unfortunate choice because — to my ear — it undermines the credibility of his assessments and the force of his later arguments. It also feels like a tonal choice that someone who lacks the courage of his convictions might make. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe in India this is the only way to write a book addressing this topic without being burned at the stake. For me the tone became grating by about page 100, and the remaining 166 pages were much less interesting as a result.

I’ll say it again, I think the tone served to mask some insecurities about his own arguments. His analysis in several areas was sharp, but flippant. In many cases arguments were presented without enough evidence to justify the pose. He quotes his own writing several times, uses anecdotes from journalism work he did two decades ago to justify entire chapters, and seems to be begging the question for several of the arguments.

To add to all this, the book really falls flat on its face when Joseph shifts from analysis to recommendation in the end chapters. It’s clear he has a shallow view of history and a cynical view of the possibility of change. After spending hundreds of pages describing the misery and chaos of his home country, he abruptly segues to “non-profit work is hopeless and the youth should focus on making money so they can be better philanthropists” and “we need to establish a culture of tipping for service.”

I am very much an outsider here. I understand that. I won’t try to make my own diagnosis or prognosis because it would not be well informed. But what I can say is that this book, which seems to want to say something sharp and insightful about the state of this part of the world, is cynical and not rigorous enough in its thinking to have earned its final, hollow pot shots.

Booklog: City of Night Birds

2026-02-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

Another book I picked up because it was chosen by my book club.

I enjoy book club because it exposes me to books outside my typical sphere of interest. However, I have to admit that sometimes we pick a dud.

In this particular case, the writing just didn’t sing for me. A few years ago, I read Colum McCann’s novel Dancer about Rudolf Nureyev, and while that novel had its own flaws, it was written with a lyricism that felt much more suitable to the subject.

City of Night Birds, on the other hand, was overlong and the prose and dialogue were incredibly wooden. Important psychological beats happened without much warning and weren’t given their due as the narrative unfolded. The politics, while incredibly relevant to the story’s time period and eventual plot points, came across as shoehorned and shallow. As if the author realized she could not go 300 odd pages without mentioning them, but was more irritated by this fact than inspired to explore how they might actually shape her characters.

Overall, not something I particularly connected with. But I can also admit, that maybe I know too much about the business of the “Reese’s Book Club” stamp on the cover and the fact that those promoting to book see it more as an HBO mini series with significant ROI potential than a piece of standalone literature.

Booklog: Satantango

2026-02-12T00:00:00.000+00:00

One of the problems that plagues post-modernist literature, in my estimation, is that it can — at times — fetishize form to such an extent that it starts to detract from an otherwise compelling story. Don’t mistake me, I generally gravitate to and appreciate work that rejects traditional forms and tries earnestly to discover new modes of expression. This is not as a sweeping condemnation of the project. More so it is a recognition of where things can go pear-shaped, so to speak.

That caveat out of the way, this is a pretty stellar debut from the man who went on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature 40 years after its initial publication. The book artfully captures the paranoia and despair that leeches into rural life in a way I haven’t seen demonstrated before. It also does a clever job of showing just how this state of life could leave these communities vulnerable to and desperate for charismatic, totalitarian leaders. Something which speaks to the present moment more than I expected it to.

The blurb on the front states that the book is “profoundly unsettling” and I’m inclined to agree. It was also smartly arranged, devilishly ambiguous, and darkly comic. Overall, I enjoyed my time with it. The one caveat I reserve is that the final “resolution” felt more like a cute response to the impositions of the chosen form, rather than than an insightful barb. A self-satisfaction with the aesthetic principal first sketched out, rather than any final significance.

Thus we return, fatefully, to my opening salvo about the pitfalls of postmodernism in literature.

Booklog: Human Acts

2026-01-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

Political fiction always runs the risk of being too melodramatic or self-serious. The urge to anticipate spin or push back against propaganda can dampen artistic sensibilities if it’s over indulged.

Not the case with this novel. It takes the best approach available to the form. Rather than focusing on lionizing the heroes of an uprising or leaning into cliched re-hashing of national history, it centers the story on the tragedy of one life needlessly cut short. It follows the ripples of this down through history to the present. It does not flinch, it does not look away. And it forces you to contemplate: if this is the toll of one human life how could anyone ever justify the cost of tyranny?

There’s a lot more to it than this, of course, but the central question pulses throughout like a heartbeat pounding in your ears.

Booklog: Hospital of the Transfiguration

2026-01-15T00:00:00.000+00:00

Really fascinating to read a Lem novel written in this mode. It makes you wonder what his career might have been like if the censors hadn’t given him so much trouble that he decided Science Fiction was a better vehicle for his ideas.

In the middle of the book there is a chapter where the protagonist assists in a brain surgery to try and remove a tumor. The scene was a text book example of clinical, precise horror writing. My entire body cringed beneath the surgeon’s knife.

The story is a little uneven in terms of pacing and tone. Some characters felt a bit flat. But it’s a pretty fantastic debut, all that not withstanding. If you squint you can see the darkly cynical worldview of his later work and understand a bit better the forces that shaped it.

Booklog: The Rebel

2026-01-08T00:00:00.000+00:00

Well worth the cost of ending his friendship with Jean-Paul.

Several times while reading this book, I had a hard to describe experience. As if I could clearly grasp all of the eddies and currents of the history of western philosophy over the last 250 years. Something like hovering over the knotted stream of time and being able to see the whole field of play as its rapids wind through the valley of history to flow into the present.

The Rebel is not a rigorous work of philosophy so much as it’s a collection of evaluative essays that look at philosophy and history through the lens of sociopolitical rebellion. The first three quarters of the book do a really fantastic job of demonstrating a deep understanding of different philosophical projects, most notably those of Marx and Nietzsche, and adeptly highlighting both their motivations and their shortcomings.

I’m probably primed more than most to agree with Camus’s assessments in several of these areas. Particularly because of his emphasis on revolutionary trade unionism and the rebellion inherent in the art of the novel. That not withstanding, though, there are some things that Camus got right from the jump, e.g. a critical view of Lenin’s emphasis on the necessity of violent repression after the revolution and Nietzsche’s strength as a thinker well adept at diagnosing the philosophical sickness of the age, but a pretty disastrous prophet. And plenty of stuff that’s a bit embarrassing in hindsight, i.e. the claim that dialectical materialism’s inevitability of revolution has been adequately kept in check by the gains made by labor unions (O Tempora, O Mores!).

A little bit of research confirms that this wasn’t meant to be a philosophical treatise of rebellion. Camus himself said that these essays were more a means of organizing his thoughts around a given subject for his other projects than a fully formed theory.

But this was my first encounter with Camus’s non-fiction. He writes well, even in translation which is well-known to sanitize & standardize a writer’s native style. I’ll leave you with one of the countless great lines the drops throughout the 300 pages:

Martyrs do not build Churches; they are the mortar […]
— p 172

I’ve got a copy of The Plague in the original french (”La peste”) sitting on my shelf staring at me. This might be the thing that pushes me to finally pick it up this year.

Booklog: The Books of Jacob

2025-12-16T00:00:00.000+00:00

Being married into a Polish family, I have been aware of and very much in awe of Tokarczuk’s work for the better part of the last decade. Flights was a great introduction. By the time I got to Primeval and Other Times, she had fully and irrevocably sunk her curious little hooks into my brain.

That being said, though, I was not keen to pick up this nearly 1,000 page tome until I happened to read this essay from her translator, Jennifer Croft, who spent the better part of a decade painstakingly translating the book into English. Croft is the best kind of translator an author could ask for: reverential and devout. Needless to say, I don’t regret the decision to pick it up.

Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.
— p130

Tokarczuk is meticulous in her exploration of the themes, characters, events of her chosen subject. It’s one of those rare books that feels like it contains an entire world, fully realized.

You might be tempted, at first blush, to assume that the titular character, Jacob Frank, is the protagonist of this sprawling novel. After all, he is a mysterious 18th century Jewish mystic who claims to be the Messiah and gathers around him a congregation of true believers from the scattered nations and tribes of eastern Europe. But Jacob’s true beliefs, intentions, and motivations are never examined. In fact, in this expansive book he is the one character who’s interiority we are never permitted to see. And so, after a few hundred pages you begin to realize that this inscrutable messiah and the winding journey he and his sect take through pre-modern Europe are the means to contemplate something bigger, something almost inexpressible.

Each character, no matter how minor, is treated with the utmost care and attention. Many of the more prominent ones serve to contrast and highlight the features and beliefs of others. Some characters are setup as foils, Molwida, a nomadic Polish Noble who serves as a translator and secretary for the fledgling cult, is an incredible counter point to Nahman, one of the first and most faithful believers in Jacob’s purpose and destiny. In the margins, a polish priest tireless edits his proto-encyclopedia and dreams of having all knowledge organized and accessible to anyone who wants it. He corresponds with a poet who tells him that literature is “the perfection of imprecise forms.” These are just four examples from a cast of countless more.

Taking a step back to look at the whole, the fate of the Frankists serves almost like an elaborate frame that guides your eye deeper into a baroque landscape. The narrative takes in the full scenery of the cities, nations, and peoples of the 18th century as they convulse and transform into something different. In this book you find Reason in tension with Faith, history serving as myth, truth underpinned by the lies we must tell to understand it. At the end of your long wandering, as Tokarczuk’s omniscient narrator looks down curiously on her writing the final words, you come to realize that this book is about us. About the countless, invisible ways in which we have been shaped by the alien and forgotten forces of our past.

A demanding novel, to be sure, but well worth the effort.

Booklog: The Ministry of Time

2025-11-28T00:00:00.000+00:00

This was the selection for a monthly book club I’ve recently joined. I don’t think I would have picked it up otherwise. But I’m glad I did! It was an entertaining read.

Nothing groundbreaking here though, bit of a genre mash-up: romance, thriller, and science fiction. There were some interesting threads: the identities forced on us by our own historical contingency, the long term political consequences of the climate change, sublimated reactions to personal trauma. But Bradley never quite pulled on any of these enough for them to feel insightful or meaningful.

The twist is a pretty clichéd bit of time travel fiction and it’s something a close reader will see coming from before the middle point of the book. Which I have to admit was a bit disappointing.

But don’t mistake this for review for a pan! Aside from a few tortured similes I think the writing was well executed. Most notably, I think Bradley did a great job with the historical dialogue. Characters from the each century speak with consistent and distinct dialects. The interactions and social mores across epochs are well thought out and feel natural. These things are not easy, but Bradly does them so well they feel effortless.

Booklog: I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness

2025-11-15T00:00:00.000+00:00

I read Solà’s previous novel earlier this year and was awed by it. I subsequently bought her latest novel almost in a fugue state, certain that it would be artful and sharp.

This one had a dark, earthy texture. A continuation, but somehow also a departure from the earlier themes and preoccupations of mountains.

She’s more controlled here. Her narrative forms and characters feel more sustained and focused than the phantasmagoria of the earlier work. Worth checking out, but definitely darker and less exuberant than the prose I fell in love with earlier this year.

Booklog: Gilgamesh

2025-11-07T00:00:00.000+00:00

I read a more literal translation of this book over a decade ago. The little bit I remember is that it was quite dry and I spent most of my time parsing academic footnotes.

The full title of this edition is “Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse.” David Ferry, who doesn’t read cuneiform or speak Sumerian or Babylonian, has a pretty straightforward goal with his rendering: based one what we know about the epic and its history, make the most accessible version of this poem for contemporary English readers. As a result, it’s not a translation so much as it is an adaptation. This book is to the original epic what “She’s the Man” is to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

Does Ferry succeed? I think he does, for the most part. I certainly felt more affected by this story. The characters felt more alive. The images felt more vivid. In particular, the section where Gilgamesh follows the path of the sun in the dark tunnels under the mountain was very well done.

Booklog: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution

2025-10-30T00:00:00.000+00:00

I was very interested in this history for a few reasons.

First, de Tocqueville is writing about the French Revolution in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution and was serving in the 2^ème République as it lapsed into empire — actions for which he was subsequently jailed. No matter how objective you try to be, experiences like this are bound to color your view of history. He’s also writing about the Revolution with no knowledge of the subsequent restoration of democracy in France. This book came out 14 years before the 3^ème République would appear. (France is currently on its 5th Republic for those keeping score.)

Second, I wanted a better understanding of how this change was understood in the more immediate aftermath of the Revolution. De Tocqueville wasn’t alive during 1789, but he and his contemporaries lived in the long shadow of its consequences.

This context in mind, it turned out to be an instructive and rewarding read! He goes to great pains to demonstrate that characteristics of French government and administrative structure that are often credited to the Revolution were in fact established under the Ancien Régime; administrative centralization being a key example. Perhaps most eye opening was his (fairly convincing) argument that the Revolution was triggered not because the regime of Louis XVI was the most oppressive, but rather because its poorly executed reforms served to throw the injustice of the existing system into sharper relief.

De Tocqueville was a liberal, in the 19th c. sense, and the bias inherent in that framing shows up quite often in his characterizations and conclusions. However, it’s hard to hold that against him when he hits you with great aphoristic lines like:

Men who value only those material advantages from freedom have never kept it long.

As with much history from before the 20th c., sources and citations are not rigorous. At times he writes phrases like “I have held a secret document in my hand that stated…” and it’s hard not to arch an eyebrow. There are also some curious artifacts of the context in which it was written. For example, he refers to Napoleon Bonaparte several times, but never by name. Only using monikers like “the despot.” A rhetorical tic evokes parallels to some contemporary posting habits in the U.S.

As he nears the end of his argument you start to get a real sense of his bitterness at the failures of 1848 and his cynicism about France’s ability to govern itself democratically. I hadn’t planned to, but this final turn does make me interested in picking up a copy of his Souvenirs of 1848.

Booklog: Dancing in Odessa

2025-10-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to read Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Naturally, I snagged this slim collection when I stumbled across it in an English bookstore in Mumbai.

He’s a much younger poet when writing these poems, and it shows to a degree. However, it is still a cut above most contemporary poetry being written today. It’s full of explicit nods to his influences and aspirations. The ecstasy and anxiety of the young poet is comforting, knowing what comes next. There’s a fantastic stanza early on that captures this well:

But on certain afternoons
the Republic of Psalms opens up
and I grow frightened that I haven’t lived, died, not enough
to scratch this ecstasy into vowels, hear
splashes of clear, biblical speech.

Lines like these are why Kaminsky is one of the most interesting modern poets, as far as I’m concerned.

This edition also includes several fun Easter eggs in the acknowledgements. Kaveh Akbar’s current agent, Jacqueline Ko, is mentioned as an early believer in his work. A pre-Nobel prize “Lousie” Glück is also thanked for feedback on the collection prior to publishing.

Booklog: Selected Poems

2025-10-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

Finished reading this collection during a recent trip to Oman. Felt oddly appropriate to finish on the Ballad of Billy Budd with the sound of waves from a short distance, gulls squawking overhead.

Melville’s turn to poetry at the end of his career is endlessly fascinating to me. His commitment to traditional, iambic forms at a time when his contemporaries (namely, Walt Whitman) were doing incredibly interesting things with blank verse almost feels like a practical joke or a cantankerous reaction to “the times.” But, and especially with his epic poem “Clarel,” he is doing some things that are worth paying attention to.

What’s more, in his Civil War poems, despite making his allegiances clear from the first page, he is constantly undercutting the more cliched expectations for war poems. Every line about heroism or bravery is quickly undercut by the cold realities of the brutal conflict.

Not for everyone, but I certainly enjoyed most of it. Will probably be picking up the full text of “Clarel” soon.

Booklog: Frankenstein

2025-09-29T00:00:00.000+00:00

To my eternal embarrassment I had only ever read excerpts from or essays about this book. Never the original novel in its entirety. Now I can more confidently say that you should be required to read this before you’re allowed to pitch your start up idea.

Jokes aside, it’s hard to read this novel without any prior conceptions. This story in all its mutations and evolutions takes up so much space in the modern cultural imagination that you’d be forgiven for thinking you know it backward and forward already. But Shelley’s original is really a masterclass in so many things: the gothic style, the epistolary, layered and conflicting narrative perspectives, and of course the parable of how misguided our obsession with scientific progress can be if divorced from a moral foundation.

Aside from seething with jealousy that Shelley managed to write something so good when she was only 18, I enjoyed reading it through two lenses I had come across recently. First, of course, the contemporary frenzy about generative “A.I.”. Second, as the Danish author Olga Ravn has pointed out, it can understood as a rich metaphor for motherhood. Both of these lenses were rewarding and fruitful.

Booklog: The Emperor of Gladness

2025-09-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

I have to admit that I picked this up primarily out of morbid curiosity. Tom Crewe’s piece in LRB made me want to know if it was really so bad. I also listened to interviews with Ocean Vuong and read some of the criticism of the criticism.

Four hundred pages later, here’s where I am: I did not enjoy reading this book. I think I may have enjoyed reading the book that Ocean Vuong talks about in his interviews. But the aspirations of the artist do not appear to have made it to the page.

Of course, there’s a chance that Vuong is writing outside of the tradition I am most familiar with. This is often brought up by defenders of the novel, but these counter arguments rest on theories of fiction and narrative frameworks. And none of them point to anything in the prose that adequately supports them — at least, none of the ones I have found.

There’s this trend in publishing where people emphasize a book being “written by a poet.” Often it serves as an important part of the marketing plan when a novel is published. I think the reason publishers lead with it is because it carries with it the assumption that poets, more so than your typical prose writer, will agonize over ever syllable, simile, and metaphor in the book. That they’ll invent new forms to hold their unique vision of the world, rather than stick to rote or prescribed rules of narrative. And this is maybe what’s most frustrating about this book. It is so generic and unconsidered in almost every way. The relationships that are supposed to anchor the lack of action feel one-dimensional and inauthentic. The “comedic set pieces” feel dropped in and unearned. Even when he’s reaching for lyrical images, they come across as forced and heavy-handed.

For what it’s worth, though, I don’t think I’d forgive even a non-poet novelist for writing the simile: “two fast-food workers in a shrink’s office, like a New Yorker cartoon caption contest.”

At the end of the day, there was almost something here. There were several places in this book where you could see Vuong reaching for something more insightful, more profound, only to watch him trip over his own unchecked sentimentalism. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe history will look back at this book and judge it more kindly. Right now, though, it feels like Vuong’s editors assumed they had a hit and didn’t read the manuscript too closely.

Booklog: Rusty Brown

2025-09-12T00:00:00.000+00:00

Any time someone tells you that graphic novels aren’t serious or worth your time, shove this beautiful book into their hands and lock them in a room until they’ve read the whole thing.

Ware is a master of the form. I say that without hyperbole. He’s doing some of the most interesting visual storytelling I’ve ever seen throughout this book. The opening pages of the Jordan Lint section knocked me over. Raw, uncut characterization and narrative beamed straight into the visual cortex.

And it’s not just the art. It’s the fully realized characters. The minutely detailed world they inhabit. The economy of exposition. All of it adds up to one of the most rewarding reading experiences you can have if you give it the time and attention it merits.

It’s a really special book. A privilege to have spent time with it, and I’m glad Ware stuck with the project over the two decades he was working on it.

Booklog: Elmer Gantry

2025-09-08T00:00:00.000+00:00

When a book is dedicated to H. L. Mencken, you know it’s going to be good. When this dedication is immediately followed by the disclaimer:

No character in this book is the portrait of any actual person.

You know that you’re in for an incisive treat.

Chronicling the grotesque life and career of the titular character, it’s pretty shocking how much of the cultural criticism in this 100 year old novel still holds water in the present. The fact that this was written before the rise of Billy Graham and James Dobson and the rest means it borders on the prophetic.

I read this with an eye toward characterization and historical approaches to the subject of religious institutions in America. My thinking was that maybe, there would be some dated but relevant insights that I could modernize for an in-progress manuscript. I’m left here after finishing it, wondering if Sinclair Lewis didn’t already put the matter to bed when he wrote this in 1927.

Of course, he didn’t and I’ll still keep working on my own book. But damn if it isn’t depressing to realize the same reactionary moralism and compromised institutions have been present and at work in America for more than a century.

Booklog: Anarchy and Christianity

2025-08-12T00:00:00.000+00:00

Reading this toward a manuscript that’s currently in progress. Rather surprised I didn’t come across this part of Ellul’s oeuvre earlier.

In material terms, I’m not really a fan of these cheap, print-to-order books. There were several printing errors in the forward to the text. Fortunately, the facsimile of the original English translation was in good condition.

I find Ellul’s approach to religious writing eminently enjoyable. Maybe it’s because of my upbringing, but his rigorously logical structure serves him better here than in his sociological texts. I think it’s the combination of him setting up an argument I’m very familiar with and then going over every minute detail only to reach a conclusion that would have led to his execution for heresy if he were writing in an earlier century.

As with all Ellul, there are plenty of broad claims without citation, some poorly aged rhetoric that aligns a bit too well with today’s reactionary politics (there are a few paragraphs against state-mandated vaccination), and conclusions that don’t feel entirely earned. But also some very delightfully unconventional, well supported, insights into our present condition - and in this case, biblical texts.

Booklog: The Hurting Kind

2025-08-08T00:00:00.000+00:00

Received this as a birthday gift from my sister earlier this year and finally cracked it open.

I enjoyed it. Not everything rang true to my ear, but maybe that’s because they are clearly COVID lockdown poems and they feel very much of that moment in time. Maybe it’s too soon for me to judge them objectively. (Or maybe it’s too late?)

She does turn a very good line, though. For example:

Am I stronger or weaker than when the year began,
a lie that joins two selves like a hinge. […]

I’m a novice when it comes to poetry, but I’d say that Limón’s style feels like Louise Glück writing in a more confessional mode. And despite my quibbles the final poem was strong and worth recommending.

Booklog: When I Sing, Mountains Dance

2025-08-05T00:00:00.000+00:00

A really sublime debut. Solà is the type of writer who makes other writers seethe with jealousy. Her story here is lyrical, surreal, mythic. It’s somehow minutely detailed yet almost universal.

Her versatility with narrative voice is the real star. This book has an entire chapter written from the perspective of a network of fungal growth in the mountains! It has the perspective of the mountains themselves as they’re violently birthed, as they bear witness to and resent the feckless humans that build homes on them, and as they are slowly worn down by time.

None of these choices should work. In any other context they would be too outlandish, too gimmicky, borderline absurd. And yet they all somehow still work to drive the narrative forward. To help you understand how deeply interconnected the people and the land are, and to drive home the tragedy and redemption at the heart of the novel.

Really a special book. A pleasure to have read it.

Booklog: Jacques the Fatalist

2025-07-29T00:00:00.000+00:00

In the interest of full transparency, I’ve tried and failed to read the full text of Diderot’s 18th century exploration of fate, free will, and the conventions of narrative form on and off since roughly 2010. Part of the problem was that I was trying to read in the original French. This in and of itself isn’t necessarily an insurmountable hurdle for me. However, the copy I owned was just a brief introduction and then the text. More often than not I was tripped up when I came across some old scrap of idiom that I wasn’t familiar with or a dated cultural reference that was completely unknown to me. As a result, I would often lose momentum and question why I was putting myself through this experience.

Fortunately, all of this changed once I picked up a copy of David Coward’s English translation. Not only did the extensive end notes and explanations come to my aid whenever I was at risk of drowning under mountains of misunderstood references, but his version finally helped me understand — more emotionally than intellectually, because this was something I knew but couldn’t quite grasp as I read the French — just how playful and funny Diderot’s prose is. Of course, though, this also left me with doubts about my own ability to read and appreciate the nuances of written French. I consoled myself by reading the English side by side with my original copy. Occasionally, I would read an especially flowery bit of archaic British idiom and turn to my French copy only to discover that Coward allowed himself to reach for the something more playful or unexpected.

I don’t advertise it much, but as an undergraduate I earned a certification in Translation Studies (specifically literary translation), and there was a not inconsequential amount of time in my early adulthood where I thought I might become a literary translator of experimental fiction. Of course, these thoughts quickly evaporated the first time I sat down and calculated the total debt I had shouldered as a consequence of my degree(s). (An event which led, ultimately, to a winding career in IT consulting and software engineering instead.) Nevertheless, being able to read an original and a translation side by side like this, to see the decisions a translator made either to embellish, standardize, or make the original more legible to a foreign audience still fascinates me.

But, Reader, you are probably asking what my impressions of Diderot’s text were. Fear not, now that I have dispensed with personal anecdotes I shall meet your expectations head on.

The story and its telling still feel unconventional +250 years after the book was written. Diderot is very much an artist at play here. Experimenting with form, tone, and gleefully subverting the expectations of his readers — even going so far as to put words into your mouth and then tell you that you are a fool for asking such questions.

The meandering protagonist and his master discuss weighty subjects, they discuss frivolous subjects, they get sidetracked by digressions, they forget where they left off. It’s somehow both a masterclass in the minute detail necessary for realism and a rebuke of it.

What can I say? Read the classics. You won’t regret it. Or maybe you will, but, as I’m sure Diderot would tell you, that’s your problem, not his.

Booklog: The Eye of the Master

2025-07-14T00:00:00.000+00:00

Enjoyed this, though it took me a bit longer to circle back to than I expected.

Pasquinelli does an excellent job of charting the deep history and development of AI as a concept, technology, and social process.

Most crucially, for my money, he makes a detailed and convincing argument that AI is not some miraculous innovation in technology but rather the logical next step in a long process of the mechanization and automation of labor tasks. It’s also refreshing to have a social scholar acknowledge the flawed premise these models are based on and reference recent research into their diminishing returns.

Booklog: Deaf Republic

2025-07-06T00:00:00.000+00:00

At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?

One of the best contemporary poetry collections I’ve read recently. Except it feels like a category error to call this a “poetry collection.” It’s a complete story with characters and events. Almost like a novel in the form of a poetry collection.

It’s sharp and profound. At several points I realized I would read a page, stop and stare out my window, and then read the page again. Kaminsky wields language like a knife.

Perhaps worth noting that even though this is ostensibly about the erosion of society in Ukraine in the late 2010s, published just prior to the total war which broke out in the region in the 2020s, but it’s impossible to read it at the present moment and not feel the weight of its implications for the present moment in America.

I won’t recommend it to you, because it sits heavy, but I think you should read it.

Booklog: Aliss at the Fire

2025-07-03T00:00:00.000+00:00

Lately I have been reading ebooks in bed before I go to sleep. I find this much more restorative than scrolling on social media.

However, I had to stop reading this one that way. The lines between dream and reality were becoming too permeable. It was increasingly hard to know where I was.

Fosse’s style is musical and hypnotic. It’s not quite the modernism of Faulkner or Joyce. But it’s not pure experimentation either.

Reading this induced an almost mystical sensation. The unshakeable notion that everything is interlinked. This book is the memory of a half-forgotten dream.

Booklog: The Brothers Karamazov

2025-07-02T00:00:00.000+00:00

It is tempting, very tempting, with a book such as this to praise it effusively the moment you have finished reading. This impulse is driven by the book’s well established reputation among the reading public as one of “the greatest books ever written” as well as the exceptional length of the text. I want to resist that impulse, as best I can, and give my honest assessment of the book’s prose, themes, and the overall impression it has made on me.

As far as writing style, I am incredibly conflicted. The prose is shaggy and erratic. Characters, more often than not, “seem” to feel things rather than just feeling them. Action happens “suddenly” so often it begins to lose any sort of urgency or meaning. And descriptions lean far too heavily on the terms “sort of” or “something like.” These, to my mind, are all the hallmarks of a writer who has not taken the time to refine their work or trim the fat from their initial drafts. That being said, this criticism is complicated by the fact of this being a work in translation (though the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation gives every indication that it is meticulously researched and faithful to the original) and the fact, mentioned in this edition’s Introduction, that Dostoevsky has purposefully crafted this narrative voice. So I’m led to believe the effect is intentional. And yet. And yet, I can’t bring myself to fully embrace the argument.

Fortunately the themes do not fall victim to the same criticism. This is where Dostoevsky’s talent is most on display. Characters are very fully developed. The world feels real and lived in. The choreography of the plot is meticulous and well executed. My main gripe here is the identities of the characters and how they align with the ideas Dostoevsky explores. There is a thread of classicism — why else would the true criminal be the lowest born of the brothers? — and he doesn’t seem to have any interest in criticizing the social hierarchies that forced them all into their fates. I’ll also say, the core premise and the didactic nature of the denouement feels preachy and heavy handed at different points. The brother who puts his faith in his own reason is driven mad by his failure to understand its implications and his possible role in the consequences. The brother who dedicated himself to the church is a hero who gets the last word. Perhaps not something that 19th century Russia was ready for, but I would have preferred that Dostoevsky leaned into the ambiguity of the crime and the trial that followed. Give us less certainty about the truth and our understanding of what happened. He flirts with this toward the end, but then goes out of his way to explicitly make his point about the truth and the implications of it. Of course, I can’t hold this against the work, it’s simply that I am partial to stories different than the one Dostoevsky decided to tell.

After a few months lugging this book around, I’ll say that the overall impression was good. Maybe not profound. Maybe not life altering. But I can’t say that the time was wasted. There are some moments in the book that are truly beautiful. The Grand Inquisitor chapter was excellent, it really holds up! Perhaps my intense scrutiny is actually just the self-preserving tick of a jealous writer, secretly anxious he’ll never accomplish anything as enduring as the book he’s just read. I’m too close to the situation to say for sure. In any case, this is the second Dostoevsky novel I’ve read, the first being The Double, and the opinion that’s crystallizing about his body of work is this: he has an incredible talent for outlining and probing the ideas and anxieties that underpin modern life, but his prose does a disservice to these insights.

And so for that — and I say this with affection — I think he might be the greatest bad writer I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

Booklog: Crocosmia

2025-06-06T00:00:00.000+00:00

[I read an ARC of this book and will be pitching reviews to other publications. If any of them take me up, I’ll circle back here with a link.]

Booklog: I Will Die in a Foreign Land

2025-06-02T00:00:00.000+00:00

A really well executed debut.

Pickhart’s prose is lyrical and sharp. The structure is unexpected and leads to surprising narrative harmonies. The history is ongoing and heartbreaking. The work helps us begin to process the extent of the tragedy that has unfolded this past decade — and longer.

I was grateful to her for ending the story on a hopeful note. Though the knowledge of the events that followed shortly after this book’s publication add a bittersweetness that only history can.

Booklog: What Have You Left Behind?

2025-05-07T00:00:00.000+00:00

One of the most harrowing books I have ever read.

Over and over again it forces us to look at the human cost. This book is a relentless, meticulous accounting of the quotidian atrocities of the war in Yemen.

Booklog: Anxious People

2025-04-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

I say this with all sincerity, I wanted to like this. It was recommended by someone who is very important to me. I was primed to embrace it with open arms.

Ultimately, though, I find that Backman’s prose rings a bit hollow to my ear, his characterizations are thin, surface-level things based on whatever popular stereotypes are near to hand, the humor too often feels forced and clichéd, and the twists and turns of his plotting are a bit too cute by half. If by some magic an exurb were to be transmuted into a book, I imagine the result would be something like this novel.

I know that this book deals with heavy themes in an approachable way. I know that it has been meaningful and profound for many of its readers. Unfortunately, I am forced to admit that I walked away from the experience feeling like I had just sat through a made for TV Hallmark movie.

I’m sure Fred’s a great guy! I’m glad he’s found his audience and achieved success. I don’t begrudge him that. I’m sorry that his work doesn’t resonate with me.

Booklog: The Search for the Perfect Language

2025-04-09T00:00:00.000+00:00

Thoughts on The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco

Booklog: Reinhardt’s Garden

2025-03-27T00:00:00.000+00:00

Very much enjoyed reading this.

The style pulls you along incessantly. Like the hypochondriac narrator, you are pulled along by the monomaniacal subject that drives every action. Each nested clause, digression, aside is another branch in the thicket of the jungle we are all trapped in together.

Booklog: New Selected Poems

2025-03-19T00:00:00.000+00:00

Sharp, playful, melancholic, complex. His poems shift and change every time you look at them. Meaning is constructed and you must play your part.

Booklog: Set My Heart on Fire

2025-03-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

The first half felt a bit clichéd and dated.

Part way into the second half she uses the term “psychologically uncircumcised” to describe her abusive husband, and that is a phrase that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Booklog: Structuralism and Semiotics

2025-02-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

Really wish I had stumbled across this in grad school while writing my thesis.

Booklog: America

2025-01-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

I say this with utmost affection and respect: reading this feels a bit like standing by the guy in Scanners right before his head explodes.

Also had some of the most insightful commentary on the Reagan presidency I have ever read.

Longer review originally posted on the main blog here.

Booklog: Bombay Stories

2024-12-30T00:00:00.000+00:00

Not totally thrilled with this collection. Could be due to gaps in cultural knowledge or problems of translation.

Overall there was nothing too memorable about the stories, save for one fantastic simile that’s worth sharing:

“When she looked at me again, her eyes had lost their effect, and her face seemed like a ransacked empire, a ravaged country.” [p200]

The essays at the end were more compelling. They might have helped better ground the work if they had been included at the beginning of the collection rather than the end.

Booklog: Ripe

2024-12-05T00:00:00.000+00:00

Better than I expected. At first the definitions felt a bit gimmicky, like something you do as a writer to help get the juices flowing and then delete before it goes to print. But over the course of the book, they add a depth that might not have been there otherwise.

Longer review originally posted on the main blog here.

Booklog: The Jokers

2024-11-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

Review originally posted on the main blog here.

Booklog: Ubik

2024-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00

There’s so much going on in this book that it should collapse under its own weight. Somehow it remains internally consistent and mostly coherent.

Don’t think I would consider it to be one of the 100 best novels written in English, though.

Booklog: Martyr!

2024-10-08T00:00:00.000+00:00

Not perfect, but a great debut. I hope its success leads to more novels by Kaveh Akbar in the world.

I was very much onboard until the coincidences compounded to the point of disbelief and the romance culminated in a euphoric dream sequence. Other than that though, a very enjoyable read.

Longer review originally posted to the main blog here.

Booklog: Living Things

2024-09-30T00:00:00.000+00:00

Surprisingly astute, despite its stylistic simplicity. In dialogue with the Borges collection I’ve been reading in tandem, which was a delightful surprise.

Booklog: A Tale of Two Cities

2024-09-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

To my modern ear, Dickens can feel overdramatic at times. That's no exception here, and he certainly comes off as a bit of bleeding heart on many pages of this book.

That being said, the adeptness of his plotting, the fullness of characters, and the unflinching look at the both the revolution and its causes in this novel all combine to sublime effect. Really one of his best, I think.

Booklog: Seeing Like a State

2024-07-09T00:00:00.000+00:00

Runs a bit long & dry at points. There are several moments where it feels like Scott is just summarizing the work of others. Essentially 300 pages of scene-setting for ~50 pages of point-making.

That being said, the central argument is worth paying attention to, and I've always found that Scott writes clearly and articulately compared to your standard academic, so I'd still recommend this to anyone interested in the topic.

Booklog: MaddAddam

2024-06-24T00:00:00.000+00:00

More optimistic than I expected. Best of the trilogy, in my opinion.

Booklog: A Very Easy Death

2024-04-21T00:00:00.000+00:00

Thoughts on A Very Easy Death by Simone De Beauvoir

Booklog: Nonrequired Reading

2024-02-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

Eh. Not sure this was worth turning into a full book.

Wisława seems like a sharp and witty person who would be enjoyable to talk with, but otherwise these columns would be better reading here and there in their original context as light fare in a daily publication.

Booklog: The MANIAC

2024-02-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

Not as gripping as “When We Cease to Understand the World,” in my opinion.

That being said, this little novel qua documentary was fascinating. Labatut writes historical fiction, not about specific people, but about ideas. How they’re born, mutate, evolve, and the people they drive mad along the way.

Booklog: His Master's Voice

2024-02-06T00:00:00.000+00:00

Lem puts all other science fiction to shame. This is no exception.

Booklog: The Employees

2023-12-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

What a surprising and sharp little piece of fiction. An experiment of form and structure. More poets should try their hand at science fiction. The genre would be richer for it.

Booklog: Oval

2023-12-22T00:00:00.000+00:00

Some pacing and tone issues throughout. And at times it trips over its own self-indulgent intellectualism.

That being said, there’s something here. I wouldn’t be surprised if future offerings from Wilk get sharper.

Booklog: Sourdough

2023-11-09T00:00:00.000+00:00

A decent book at times. Unfortunately the ending evaporated any good will the previous pages had built up.

Booklog: John Brown, Abolitionist

2023-08-08T00:00:00.000+00:00

Excellent. Nuanced, yet firm in its convictions.

Booklog: Ways of Being

2023-06-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

Excellent and thought provoking piece of writing. Came for the unique perspective on intelligence and all its non-anthro forms, stayed for the citations of Kropotkin.

Booklog: Tender Is the Flesh

2023-03-11T00:00:00.000+00:00

What. the. fuck.

One of the best books I’ve read that I will never recommend to a friend.

Booklog: La Septième Fonction du langage

2023-03-08T00:00:00.000+00:00

Thoughts on La Septième Fonction du langage by Laurent Binet

Booklog: A Time for Everything

2023-02-06T00:00:00.000+00:00

Dear god, what a fraught book. Poorly structured, thematically uneven, and 300 pages longer than it should have been. Not so much a book as it is 5 books sutured together in some failed experiment.

It had so much potential. Someone get this man an editor and save him from his own ego.

Booklog: When We Cease to Understand the World

2022-11-27T00:00:00.000+00:00

A genealogy of thought that begins rooted in fact but slowly sprouts into fiction. Sharp insights, unexpected forms, and impossible to classify.

Booklog: The Cabin at the End of the World

2022-08-20T00:00:00.000+00:00

Tense and claustrophobic. I can’t say that it was a fun read, but it definitely kept me engaged.

Cons: written in the present tense, which is a bit annoying; over reliant on pop culture references to try to make the characters feel relatable.

Booklog: The Anthropocene Reviewed

2022-08-06T00:00:00.000+00:00

Almost a memoir, and equally almost a collection of essays. Picking up this book felt a bit like eating a bag of peanut m&ms - full of tiny, bite-sized pieces that are sweet on the outside and a little bit hard and savory on the inside. Though to be honest, at times the “reviews” can start to feel a bit formulaic and maybe a bit too dependent on whatever quote John felt related to what he was trying to say with each subject.

It’s worth noting though, too, that far as autobiographical non-fiction goes, this one has a certain kinship with the literary pointillism of Édouard Levé (though admittedly much less morbid). A bunch of short, distinct, and loosely connect points that as a whole imply a larger, more cohesive image. I don’t particularly think that John had this in mind when he wrote it, but it’s a nice lens to read through nonetheless.

Booklog: Scale

2022-07-29T00:00:00.000+00:00

Shocked to see such a sizeable section of the acknowledgments dedicated to thanking Cormac McCarthy for his review and input.

Booklog: Nostromo

2022-06-24T00:00:00.000+00:00

Beautiful, melancholic, and deeply pessimistic. None of Conrad’s characters escape this story unscathed, everyone is ultimately destroyed spiritually and in their own form of isolation. Not a perfect book, but a great one.

Booklog: An Inventory of Losses

2022-04-26T00:00:00.000+00:00

Not quite memoir or non-fiction. But not quite fiction either. An unexpectedly enjoyable read!

Booklog: Long Live the Post Horn!

2022-03-28T00:00:00.000+00:00

A lovely little counter point to The Crying of Lot 49.

Booklog: Selected Poems

2022-03-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

So many great poems here.

The standouts for me:

the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon
The Lovers of the Poor
In Emmanuel’s Nightmare: Another Coming of Christ

Personally, I found that Brook’s work becomes more incisive and engaging with “The Bean Eaters,” though she herself disagrees with this assessment in the interview transcription included as an addendum to this collection.

Booklog: How to Blow Up a Pipeline

2022-01-20T00:00:00.000+00:00

This is not actually an instruction manual, so the title is a bit of a bait and switch.

That being said, Malm writes clearly and convincingly on his subject. At times you can tell he’s withholding full context in order to support his arguments, which is a bit frustrating.

But despite frustrations, I would say he succeeds in posing the central question that should be on the mind of anyone who possess some amount of conviction about addressing the impending/ongoing climate catastrophe: “…Perhaps it’s past time that we consider escalation?”

Booklog: The Long Ships

2022-01-14T00:00:00.000+00:00

A delightful, winding jaunt through the life of a Viking around the turn of the first millennium. The prose is straightforward and pragmatic, much like it’s protagonist.

I enjoyed it much more than I expected to!

Booklog: A Nation of Women

2021-10-12T00:00:00.000+00:00

Interesting from a historical perspective. Badly dated as a political treatise.

Anarcho-feminism meets The Secret.

Booklog: The Glass Hotel

2021-10-06T00:00:00.000+00:00

I feel like this had real potential. The writing is great, the story left a lot to be desired. Every interesting theme or story line was left frustratingly undeveloped.

Booklog: Anarchist Communism

2021-09-01T00:00:00.000+00:00

3.5 stars.

Much more readable than I expected. Nice introduction to Kropotkin’s thought, excited to read more.

Booklog: Utopia

2021-08-12T00:00:00.000+00:00

Like almost all proscriptive utopian fiction, More’s book piques your interest at first because of its critique of the contemporary culture in which it was written - but ultimately becomes tedious as it attempts to describe a better way of doing things. (Which, I might add, did not age well with its over reliance on slavery and mercenaries in order to preserve the sensibilities of its citizenry.)

Though, it’s worth reading if only for its foundational place in the western literary cannon and its introduction of the concept of utopia.

Anyway. More’s novella is a 3, but the essays from Le Guin & Miéville in this edition are insightful and improve the experience enough that it’s overall a 4.

Booklog: The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

2021-07-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

A nice bit of experimental fiction. Love that the structure and flow of the narrative is modeled after a computer program.

Booklog: Mules and Men

2021-03-11T00:00:00.000+00:00

3.5 stars rounded up.

Felt like two distinct books. The first section is interesting, though a bit of an odd mashup between dry, anthropological study and splotches of colorful scene setting. The reasons for these characteristics, of course, are confirmed in the essay on the book’s rough road to publication included in the afterward.

The second section on Hoodoo practices in New Orleans was way more compelling than expected. Definitely not for the squeamish, though.

Booklog: End Zone

2021-01-09T00:00:00.000+00:00

Even minor DeLillo is a cut above the rest.

Everything in this book collides with everything else; language, form, function. Intimacy and knowledge are only possible through the pain of contact, the destruction of the self.

Booklog: I Curse the River of Time

2020-11-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

Sparse, direct prose in the vein of Hemingway. Isolated characters hopelessly trapped within their own self-reflection in the vein of Knut Hamsun.

Didn’t quite pull me in, but not exactly light reading.

Booklog: Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse?

2020-11-03T00:00:00.000+00:00

(3.5/5 stars)

An intriguing and original thought experiment. Playful yet confident prose. Feels a bit uneven stylistically, and ends on a somewhat meek rallying cry rather than the rousing call to action it seemed to be building toward.

Booklog: The Blue World

2020-09-20T00:00:00.000+00:00

Do not be deceived. What looks like a pulpy old paperback is in fact a searing didactic critique of modern American politics and society!

We begin with a simple account of the limitations and superstitions of a colony of humans forced to live on an ocean planet. Without warning the account shifts beneath our feet, and we embark on a wild romp through the collapse of once dependable institutions, the rise of theocratic fascism, and the ultimate triumph of nietzschean will to power.

Lest we forget, true freedom is only granted those who dare kill their gods.

Booklog: Recursion

2020-05-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

The plot is compelling and it’s undeniably a page turner. Linguistically and structurally it feels a bit too straightforward, but is well set up to become the TV series we all know it will inevitably become.

Booklog: Commodify Your Dissent

2020-05-19T00:00:00.000+00:00

Cute when it comes across as dated, terrifying when it doesn’t.

Booklog: Exhalation

2020-04-27T00:00:00.000+00:00

Rating: ✱✱✱✱

Would have been 3 stars were it not for the great final story in this collection.

Booklog: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

2019-06-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

Here is a sharp eye and a clear voice that saw America for what it was and still is today.

Editor’s Note, 2025: Revisiting this review several years later, I’d like to revise my review to say that I think Didion is an incredible essayist, who puts you under a spell. But ultimately, the worldview she operates under in many of these collected essays is not one I find convincing.

Booklog: Death of a Salesman

2019-02-02T00:00:00.000+00:00

Helluva thing to read during your daily commute.

Booklog: The Aleph and Other Stories

2019-01-27T00:00:00.000+00:00

Review originally posted to the main blog here.

Booklog: Letter 44, Volume 4

2017-09-19T00:00:00.000+00:00

I fear the series has jumped the shark with this volume...jumped over the shark and straight to Mars...

Booklog: On Tyranny

2017-09-02T00:00:00.000+00:00

A readable and succinct attempt to inform the present by way of the past.

Booklog: Operation Paperclip

2017-08-02T00:00:00.000+00:00

Very interesting and frequently horrifying story on a piece of history not very often discussed. Three and a half stars because Jacobsen definitely writes in the voice of a journalist more so than a historian.

Booklog: Think Python

2016-05-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

Very helpful introduction to Python. Cleared up a lot of questions that were left on account of university professors' assumptions.

Booklog: Wise Blood

2016-04-10T00:00:00.000+00:00

Absolutely fantastic. A macabre plunge into the deep abyss of lost faith and un-indulged yearning. Definitely one of the top five novels written in the previous century.

Booklog: The Signal and the Noise

2016-03-26T00:00:00.000+00:00

Interesting looking into a side of statistics that I haven't had much exposure to - that future-facing branch. I look forward to exploring this topic more in-depth in some of the cited sources.

Final word on the matter: while Mr. Silver's enthusiasm comes through quite clearly in several passages of the book, he might to better to curb his projected sense superiority about how much more effective he believes his approach to be, whether it be an artifact of his subconscious or not.

Booklog: Miss Lonelyhearts

2015-09-23T00:00:00.000+00:00

A few notable excerpts:

On p.29:

“Like Shrike, the man they imitated, they were machines for making jokes. A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot, steam, or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or God, made jokes.”

On p.55:

“Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world had a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.”

On p.57:

“'Perhaps I can make you understand. Let's start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he's tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.'”

And let's not fail to mention the Afterword! If you are fortunate enough to procure a copy with the succinct 20 pages punched up by Stanley Edgar Hyman, you will find they greatly enrich any further understanding you might wish to cultivate - both contextual and allegorical.

Booklog: JR

2015-03-08T00:00:00.000+00:00

I've been trying for about a month to think of how I might best put into words the experience of reading this book.

This is the closest I can come to doing it justice:

This book is the literary equivalent of Jacques the Fatalist snorting a pile of stimulants and running screaming through the 60s and 70s. It is breathless and heartbreaking and hilarious.

Booklog: Middlesex

2014-08-28T00:00:00.000+00:00

Rating: ✱✱✱

Why 3 stars? I'm not going to lie, there are some things Eugenides does extremely extremely well. However, he often peppers these profound moments with heavy-handed foreshadowing - and for me this pepper became irksome after a while, regardless of whether or not was in keeping with the authorial voice of the novel's precocious narrator.

So, while he's no doubt adept at writing the American generational epic, he is grappling with a form already perfected by Steinbeck...

...Essentially, I think I am saying I should not have read this novel so soon after East of Eden. Because I find myself wondering how Steinbeck would have handled the story of Callie turned Cal -- and I think I would have found Steinbeck's telling more immersive.

This is likely my own fault more so than Eugenides'.

Booklog: East of Eden

2014-08-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

It's not a masterpiece. That word has been too freely used and now its meaning's tarnished. No, Steinbeck's novel is long, messy, and meandering — and from this grows a profound beauty that can only be fully understood by diving in head first and letting the tumultuous waves wash over you and swallow you whole.

Booklog: A Handful of Dust

2014-07-31T00:00:00.000+00:00

I have just suffered a mighty blow at the hands of a brilliant masochist. Waugh crafts this story with such elegance and witty perspicuity that the blows he strikes are incomparably precise and utterly horrifying.

Booklog: Eat, Pray, Love

2014-03-28T00:00:00.000+00:00

The exciting story of how an upper-middle class white woman proved she didn't need a man by traveling around the world from male-dominated relationship to male-dominated relationship until she found one she liked enough to date.

Booklog: The Lesson of the Master

2013-09-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

The first I've read of James. This could be the start of a long, long relationship.

Booklog: Ill Seen Ill Said

2013-09-15T00:00:00.000+00:00

Don't get me wrong, I love Beckett. But he is rarely a pleasure to read. And yet I keep coming back to him over and over again. Why? I don't know. Maybe I'm a masochist. Perhaps I feel compelled by the praise that critics shower down on his work. But more truthfully, I think it's because of works like this and Play. Works were it's not all evident at first, but where, as you think about it for days after - which you inevitably will - you realize that there was some deep seated truth within yourself that's been elucidated because of Beckett.

So here, in this scene of endless revisiting and death and endings, I found myself rereading over and over again. Then just sitting back and letting the realization of his meaning (for meaning is more important than words for Beckett) wash over me.

"Absence supreme good and yet. Illumination then go again and on return no more trace. On earth's face. Of what was never. And if by mishap some left then go again. For good again. So on. Till no more trace." p.58

Yeah...I'm probably a masochist.

Booklog: The Inferno

2013-09-14T00:00:00.000+00:00

Riveting, inventive, and a compelling read. I did, however, find myself wishing from time to time that I was able to read it in the original Italian. While Longfellow's translation is novel and fun to read, it is, ultimately, prose. It lacks that lyricism and sonority that inevitably make Dante's poetry classic.

Booklog: Freakonomics

2013-09-11T00:00:00.000+00:00

My reactions are mixed. But I can't really take the time to write them down right now. Maybe I'll come back to this.

Booklog: A Hologram for the King

2013-08-20T00:00:00.000+00:00

Eggers's most recent novel is full of potential. Unfortunately his purposeful use of sparse prose gives the reader the feeling that this novel lacked effort on the part of the author, which, I am sure, was by no means the case.

After finishing the book I found myself slightly frustrated. All the elements were there. A myriad of magnificent and relevant themes were touched on. There were moments of keen insight that I haven't experienced elsewhere. But lurking at the bottom of it all was the feeling that this was something just thrown together: easily read, easily dismissed.

Truthfully, though, after some reflection I find myself wondering if Eggers hasn't done this to prove his point. A novel with Alan Clay as the protagonist surely would not be filled with beautiful language and supreme revelation. In fact, a novel written around Alan Clay would seem sparse and altogether unfulfilling.

This possibility did not dawn on me until the last few pages (I won't mention when or why). And now, as I think back to the rest of the novel, I can say that there is probably something to this idea. And I commend Eggers for the simplicity and unassuming way in which he has made me tremble. First, at our present digital and globalized age and all its complication and consequence. Second, at the terrors of the modern man's adulthood.

Booklog: The Necessary Marriage

2013-08-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

A great read for anyone who has ever wished to enter the mind of a man deeply submersed in a drunken fever dream.

Booklog: Pale Fire

2013-08-12T00:00:00.000+00:00

There's a lot of debate among GoodReads reviewers as to whether or not the actual poem this book is written around is any good.

The mere fact that this debate exists is - I think - a testament to how well Nabokov orchestrates his themes and argument.

Booklog: The Pale King

2013-07-24T00:00:00.000+00:00

Unfinished though it may be, this book contains some of the most insightful and well written prose of contemporary literature.

One review mentioned that reading this book was akin to having found a beautiful, shattered urn and sitting in awe at the brilliance of the individual pieces. We as readers are able only to imagine - albeit, with inherent inaccuracy - how beautiful the urn might have been when it was still intact.

I disagree that review.

This book is beautiful, but not because it is broken or fragmented. It is beautiful in the same way that Michelangelo's "prisoners" are beautiful. This book is an unfinished masterpiece, but it is still the work of a master. David Foster Wallace had chosen his stone, begun carving out the images and details, and was shaping his vision. We are left with something that is truly great, not because it is finished, but because its unfinished beauty gives a glimpse of how the artist worked and where his genius might have led had he continued.

All this being said, like Michelangelo's prisoners, The Pale King does seem oddly complete in its own right. And I cannot speak highly enough about this man's writing and the brilliance with which he attempted to express his ideas.