Turn the Survey Inward
Philip K. Dick’s story “Survey Team” was so prescient for its time that it has completed the cycle and now seems passé. He sees a future where we are stuck…
Tag: books
Thoughts like Fish
Many awesome passages percolate up from the thick tome that is Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Picador Edition). “…[S]trange ideas would come to my head. Ideas that were like dead…
Attention to the Next Generation
A great line from Evelyn Waugh, said by a doctor no less, Dr. Puttock: “Some people even think that a disproportionate attention is given to the next generation.” (The End…
A War on “Casual Violence”
Let be known on this date, and for ten years hereafter, the phrase “casual violence” is heretofore stricken from usage in the English-speaking world. No longer will embryonic Nabokovs carry…
Moths and Snails and Slugs
I recently critiqued the writing style in Swamplandia!; however, there was at least one passage that had a lasting impact on me: “Outside our porch had become a cauldron of…
Inundated with Similes
Karen Russell makes excessive use of similes throughout her book Swamplandia!, at least in the first half I completed. Some are clever or insightful, such as “We were watching the…
Reading “Cholera”
Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, like Midnight’s Children, was a long, hard slog, especially for one with a glacial reading pace. The text lives in thick…
Changing Places
E-books, tablets, iPads, they are flipping the concept of an ending. With DVDs and Blu-rays and VOD, all movies now have trackers, slide bars, countdowns, to tell you when the…
More Borges
A few lines from Borges’ “The Shape of the Sword,” quoted below, have an eerily similar quality to a recently cited line from Midnight’s Children: “Whatsoever one man does, it…
Me Read Slow…
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of those books that sat unread on my bookshelf for years and years. Admittedly, I read the first few pages several times and then…