The Lost Art of Book Learning
Google searching is utilitarian, but it is not a substitute for the visceral fun of opening a random volume up to a random page and learning something new.
Google searching is utilitarian, but it is not a substitute for the visceral fun of opening a random volume up to a random page and learning something new.
I know every single one of you is wondering whether and in what ways I appreciate James Joyce’s work. So…In praise of (and in fear of) James Joyce’s oeuvre.
This week I read two novels by Hari Kunzru, a modern magician of storytelling, though the tricks worked better in one of them for my tastes.
The time felt right to reread Thomas Mann’s novella and watched Lucino Visconti’s 1971 film of desire and disease and our inability to quarantine either of them.
In times of stress, it’s good to return to nourishing comfort food, which for me means Jim Harrison’s prose.
While getting by in strange times, I read a book of short stories about how average Ukrainians got by before and after the fall of Communism.
Our minds are messy places. This novel takes you into the very nervous mind of an Ohio mother, housewife, and pie baker over the course of a thousand pages and mostly through one very long sentence.
A friend’s favorite book from last year, which describes a terrorist attack that either happened or did not happen, depending on which timeline we’re living through.
On a recommendation from a local poet, I have started reading the short stories of an American master of the form, and was greatly rewarded for the effort.
We have fooled ourselves into perceiving our technology as neutral, detached from our own biased and irrational ways.
The Balzac streak continues with a supernatural tale built on the fantastical conceit that our energies can be used to fulfill our desires or squandered and lost.
Here’s a book that takes cultural essay writing to a whole other level.
“The book was better” is not something I say very often, but it is no less true: books are a different medium and what works on the page my not work on the screen and vice versa.
On a posthumous novel by the great writer (and overwriter) from North Carolina.
On Rebecca Solnit’s 2013 collection of interwoven, digressive, personal essays about the stories we tell to make our way through life with each other.
I recently read this trilogy by Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu
About an extremely readable day book for 1922, a year in which culture changed absolutely.
On the most recent tour of Haruki Murakami’s imagination and an exploration of artistic creation itself.