Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike DavisMy review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Here is the historical background to the "global economy." A snapshot of who is going to suffer as global warming and rising seas bring us ever greater not-so-natural disasters. Mike Davis is the indispensable guide to geopolitics and the distribution of poverty, wealth and power.
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Suttree by Cormac McCarthyMy review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
There are writers who, early in their career, try on the voice of an author they admire, only to be defeated by the master. In Sutree, McCarthy out Faulkners Faulkner, working his way well past imitation to independence. The tribute is there, Faulkner's presence is palapable, but the voice is McCarthy's own. Of his books, I rank this second only to Blood Meridian.
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Simone Weil's the Iliad or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition by James P. HolokaMy review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
A brilliant misreading of the Iliad. Weil, this modern gnosic, has dissected the nature of "force" in a few pages... pages rolled, set aflame, igniting the fagots beneath you: read Weil and burn.
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The Book of Illusions: A Novel by Paul AusterMy review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I need to read this again. I missed something. I knew as I read it that I was missing something. And I knew this was a book I would have to read again. It's on my list. Not the short list. But not the "some day" list either.
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English Sentences by Paul RobertsMy review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Paul Roberts wrote this, and "Understanding English," appropriating ideas drawn from generative linguistics to teaching grammar to high school students. Francis Christensen--who died far too young--drew on Roberts in writing two essays that are arguably the best guides to teaching English composition, period, bar none, end of story.
"A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence," and "A Generative Rhetoric of the Paragraph."
They read like nothing else on the subject. This will be my twelfth year teaching freshman English. I can't imagine what I would do without them.
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The Transit of Venus by Shirley HazzardMy review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Some years ago I read a New Yorker story by Hazzard, "In These Islands." I read it a second time, then and there. Turned back to the first page and read it again. Then a third time.
There are expansive writers--like the late DFW, Whitman, Henry Miller--and there are those who fuse language in a crucible: Dickinson, Laura Riding, George Oppen: poets more often than novelists... though McCarthy has gone from one to the other, from the expansive Sutree to the compression of The Road.
No one can capture a character in a passing phrase like Hazzard... what reminds me of Dickinson is not her poems, but her letters. My parents, she writes to Higgenson, "address every morning an eclipse they call 'our father.'
This is the novel as a kind of poetry. Visionary... compressed to breathless irony.
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The Pilgrimage by Paulo CoelhoMy review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
Compostella... compost of stars?
I read this, one: because I was curious about Coelho's extraordinary popularity, and two: because at the time there was someone I knew--and we'd talked about taking this walk.. . for entirely secular reasons... (my idea was to do in reverse). There are some of the best preserved Romenesque sites in Eurpoe along the route, neolithic caves... I'd still like to do it.
Any takers? I need a companion.
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Middlemarch by George EliotMy review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
A wonderful book... but I never got over my disappointment.. that extraordinary introduction conjured in my mind a different sort of work... and what I got was...well, a very good 19th novel.
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