Luxagraf

1 2 3 4 5 next ››

08/12/08 // Book:: The Silent Cry: A Novel by Kenzaburo Oë I have a feeling that this translation is not the best in the world (though as far as I know it’s the only). Oe gets quite a bit of praise for the poetics of his language, but I didn’t really …continue reading »
07/31/08 // Book:: The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy Cormac Mccarthy’s first book may well be his best. Some the finest writing you’re likely to encounter in a contemporary novel — particularly the bits about landscape and the mountains of Tennessee. The Orchard Keeper isn’t as dark as some …continue reading »
05/24/08 // Book:: Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges My first hands on with Borges… Absolutely amazing. So far beyond what I’ve been reading lately (mainly non-fiction and some late 20th century authors). As with Faulkner, I find it shocking that I was given an undergraduate degree in English …continue reading »
01/31/08 // Book:: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami I haven’t had a chance to read much lately, I’ve been busy writing, which is good I guess, but if you don’t read you’ll never be a very good writer. I knew a good Murakami novel would make me drop …continue reading »
12/23/07 // Book:: Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Bal… by Robert D. Kaplan Fantastic portrait of the Balkans and beyond. Kaplan more or less does the exact route I’ve been wanting to do — from eastern Europe through Turkey, Syria and several ‘stans. He doesn’t go all the way across Mongolia and China …continue reading »
10/16/07 // Book:: Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of… by John Lukacs My family is from the Budapest area and left around the time of World War I. I was in a bookstore one afternoon and stumbled across this book which I thought might provide an interesting glimpse of what my great …continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester The subtitle encapsulates this on quite nicely: “A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.” Absolutely fascinating history of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, which quite frankly boggles my mind whenever I stop …continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: Ninety-two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane McGuane gets compared to Pynchon quite a bit, which I’ve never understood save perhaps the sheer madcap pace of language and witticisms, but whereas with Pynchon these come in bursts, with McGuane they’re pretty much sustained. Perhaps that’s why McGuane …continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Beautiful novel. Its easy to see why he was the first Japanese novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). His prose is of the quality that you feel lost in some gorgeous poetic wonderland. Regrettably, while this is …continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust So it goes and goes. You either like 5,000 page novels or don’t. And to think Proust wanted the whole thing bound up as one book…continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: Suttree by Cormac McCarthy Though I do intend to get back to the Proust, I wound up one day with this novel in my hands and since I’ve been meaning to read Cormac Mccarthy for years, I thought why not. Although you could say, …continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust The second volume started off a little slow, but even when he’s getting side tracked Proust is infinitely more interesting than 90 percent of the writers you’ll ever read. Once this one takes off it’s even better than the first.continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: The Best American Travel Writing 2003 by Jason Wilson I was surprised how many of these I had already read in magazines. Always good to see what other travel writers are up to. A great collection made even better by the welcome absence of Dave Eggers.continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner Somehow I graduated from college a literature major without ever having read Faulkner, a terrible, terrible oversight on my part.continue reading »
10/15/07 // Book:: Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturali… by Jonathan Evan Maslow From the NYTimes Review: In his introduction, Mr. Maslow suggests the book is "a kind of essay in political ornithology." While correct in believing this is "a field that does not quite exist, at least yet," he demonstrates why naturalists …continue reading »

1 2 3 4 5 next ››

a travelogue

Some books I've enjoyed

Reading

Most Commonly Used Tags: