Ben E P rated Between the World and Me: 5 stars
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns …
Ex-poet, revolutionary communist.
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In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns …
The stories collected in You Are Not a Stranger Here are striking, often tragic, but never melodramatic. Haslett addresses mental illness with a sensitivity and honesty that is truly impressive. His characters may be morally suspect, or simply conflicted, as many humans are, but the world they inhabit is the one we all experience. The fantastic is contextualized within the vastness and complexity of the human experience. He experiments with form and tailors his writing to his speaker, but manages to keep his even, consistent pace whenever necessary, allowing himself a poetic turn of phrase at the appropriate moments. A thoroughly impressive collection.
I really, really enjoyed this book. Millman has a great, casual, dad-jokes-and-all style that works really well when describing mushrooms that look like scrambled eggs, brain matter, pipecleaners, and phalluses. Plenty of scientific info delivered alongside or wrapped up in personal anecdotes from countless foraging expeditions in the woods of New England. The illustrations by Rick Kollath are very life-like, though they don't portend to be photo-realistic, which I think works well for the subject matter.
This is definitely not a field guide, a guide to edible mushrooms, or a dense scientific text about mycelia and their fruiting bodies. Instead, it's an easy-to-navigate quick reference on regional mushrooms and slime molds, written in a manner that allows the book to be read straight through, like a series of short, funny personal essays.
What I'm trying to say is, Lawrence Millman seems like a real fungi.
(Sorry.)
Recently, I'd seen the title making the rounds (as it had apparently doing for years) as a fiction-cum-self-help book. I figured I'd give it a shot.
This is a short, feel-good book written in a style that recalls the straight-ahead prose of certain Murakami passages (perhaps a result of the translation?) and nearly every paragraph contains a nugget of pithy wisdom from the mind or mouth of a character that could be picked up as a mantra for readers looking for that sort of thing. There's a vague, pan-deist spiritual undercurrent here that comforted the characters, and, I assume, some readers. That said, I couldn't get a grasp on the layout of the book as allegorical, or even find evidence of an overarching conceit, which made me skeptical of each philosophical point. Did Coelho intend to write a book full of enough sloganeering mystics that something thrown at the proverbial …
Recently, I'd seen the title making the rounds (as it had apparently doing for years) as a fiction-cum-self-help book. I figured I'd give it a shot.
This is a short, feel-good book written in a style that recalls the straight-ahead prose of certain Murakami passages (perhaps a result of the translation?) and nearly every paragraph contains a nugget of pithy wisdom from the mind or mouth of a character that could be picked up as a mantra for readers looking for that sort of thing. There's a vague, pan-deist spiritual undercurrent here that comforted the characters, and, I assume, some readers. That said, I couldn't get a grasp on the layout of the book as allegorical, or even find evidence of an overarching conceit, which made me skeptical of each philosophical point. Did Coelho intend to write a book full of enough sloganeering mystics that something thrown at the proverbial wall of the reader's cerebral cortex would "stick"?
Perhaps if I wasn't reading it with so much intention, predicated on others' recommendations (expecting, as it were, some amount of sage advice to be dispensed within its couple hundred pages), I would have let myself enjoy it more readily. But, as it stands, I simply found it a decent, quick read.
There was a Russian writer who wrote absurdist short stories. He wrote and he wrote, and sometimes he did not write. When he was not writing, the stories disappeared. Time is not kind to writers. Eventually, he stopped writing forever. We'd better stop speaking of him.
Stymied by his penchant for beautiful descriptive passages, Nabokov's plot development falters and circles back on itself. Despite his attempts to dissuade others from the use of allegorical language, it seems that this whole book hints at an allegory which is never quite rendered clearly. Nabokov's main character, Cincinnatus C., is sentenced to beheading for "gnostical turpitude" (knowledge-related deviance?), though he ironically doesn't seem to have much of a clue about why he should be put to death, or understand any of the details surrounding the execution. The reader soon learns that Cincinnatus has performed a few verifiable miracles of sorts in public, including walking on air and disappearing, perhaps related to a talent for transforming Ally McBeal-style daydreams into reality.
Sounds interesting, right? Unfortunately, repetitive descriptions of his daily schedule during incarceration, and the shifting architecture of the fortress in which he is imprisoned account for perhaps 75% of …
Stymied by his penchant for beautiful descriptive passages, Nabokov's plot development falters and circles back on itself. Despite his attempts to dissuade others from the use of allegorical language, it seems that this whole book hints at an allegory which is never quite rendered clearly. Nabokov's main character, Cincinnatus C., is sentenced to beheading for "gnostical turpitude" (knowledge-related deviance?), though he ironically doesn't seem to have much of a clue about why he should be put to death, or understand any of the details surrounding the execution. The reader soon learns that Cincinnatus has performed a few verifiable miracles of sorts in public, including walking on air and disappearing, perhaps related to a talent for transforming Ally McBeal-style daydreams into reality.
Sounds interesting, right? Unfortunately, repetitive descriptions of his daily schedule during incarceration, and the shifting architecture of the fortress in which he is imprisoned account for perhaps 75% of the book. If Nabokov sought to give his reader the sense of confusion and emotional constipation perhaps experienced by his main character (the narrator, while omniscient, often refrains from explaining Cincinnatus' reactions to the situations in which he finds himself, barely describing his outward expressions), he has succeeded in this regard. Unfortunately, it doesn't make for a very compelling read, on the whole. The absurdity is muted by the circumlocution, Nabokov retreats from ever fully committing to his various hints at magical realism, and he seems to moralize through his characters' dialogue on sex and violence.
It's worth mentioning that the comparisons many reviewers have made to Kafka's Trial seem misguided upon finishing this book. While Kafka described an abrupt and ever-escalating encroachment into one man's fairly ordinary life, Nabokov begins with a death sentence, and follows a confused and tortured individual who exists in a dream-like state during his incarceration, alternating between despair and apathy as he is prodded toward and led into diversion after diversion. There's something distinctively less linear about Nabokov's work, whereas Kafka, for better or worse, sets out to tell us a story (however wild it may seem at points along the way).
I'm glad I stuck it out on this one: the final 30 or 40 pages feature more action than the preceding 190+, and some of the language is truly wonderful (Nabokov's off-handed description of the cameras gathered in the center of town as the "square black snouts" of photographers comes to mind). As a result, I'll probably end up checking out another of Nabokov's novels, despite my dissatisfaction with this book.
The terrifyingly prophetic novel of a post-literate future.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which …
In his first novel, Dave Eggers has written a moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the …