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Browsing All posts tagged under »Books«
The best books I read in 2014
December 28, 2014
As my free time to write at this blog gets more and more limited, I’m slimming down my annual books post to just the very best one or two. I wish I could devote a beefy writeup to all ten of these, but there’s no time; such is the reality. I read 38 books this year, 18 of which were […]
The best books I read in 2013
January 5, 2014
I’m always careful not to call this post “the best books” of the year, since I can’t claim to have read all of the great new fiction from the year or even most of it, and since many of my favorite books (usually) aren’t new. But this year, actually, I did read mostly new fiction, […]
The best books I read in 2012
December 30, 2012
I’m always careful to call this post “The best books I read” as opposed to simply “the best books of the year” for two reasons. First: as in any year, I didn’t read every major, buzzed-about title that came out. I can’t say that the few books on my list are the very best that came […]
The best books I read in 2011
January 7, 2012
It’s that time, again, to add yet another “best of” list to the mountainous mountain of “best of” lists. New books I loved in 2011 The Pale King – You’ve heard all the buzz by now: it’s David Foster Wallace’s outstanding posthumous novel. There was big controversy over whether it was even fair or right to […]
Nobody’s Fool, book vs. movie
August 13, 2011
I had read Richard Russo’s short stories in The New Yorker, but never any of his novels. He was always, to me, one of those authors my mom was always reading. She loved Bridge of Sighs and recommended it to all her friends, and there’s a large hardcover of Empire Falls somewhere in our house. […]
Next
July 29, 2011
When the latest novel by James Hynes opens, its protagonist Kevin Quinn is on a plane, landing in Texas, for a job interview. He’s thinking (worrying) about terrorist attacks. He’s imagining the most grisly, horrible ways that a terrorist could shoot down the plane from ground-level and kill them all. It’s interesting, I suppose, and […]
The Deal From Hell
June 20, 2011
When the Tribune Company bought the Times Mirror Company in 2000 (basically a hostile takeover, hardly the “merger” that many called it), the reporters of both the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times alike were none too pleased. Now James O’Shea, who was an editor for both papers, has written the story of that troubled marriage, […]
Popular novels come in pairs
May 31, 2011
I know this is an oversimplification that will annoy people, but here goes: novels, it seems to me, often become popular in pairs, by subject matter. It’s happened three times that I can think of in recent years (I’m sure there are many more examples but I’m thinking only of cases where both novels have […]
In a Strange Room
May 14, 2011
“It happens like this.” So begins Damon Galgut’s Booker-shortlisted novel In a Strange Room. It’s very matter-of-fact, isn’t it, and indeed this sets a tone for the rest of the book—events occur, the protagonist travels around, but there is little time wasted on analysis or explanation for his travels, or the motivation, or the reasoning. […]
Mr. Peanut
May 9, 2011
When you get a few pages into Adam Ross’s debut novel, you think, ‘Okay, this is a murder mystery.’ A whodunnit. And it is that, but it’s also much more. The novel is a book within a book, and within that, it’s three stories, intertwining and doubling back on themselves, about three men and their […]
Survivor
December 2, 2010
Survivor is not Chuck Palahniuk’s best, but I see why the Cult, his legion of rabid fans, loves it. I also think I would have been more impressed had I read it earlier on in my Palahniuk arc, before I had struggled through the painful tedium of trashy books like Lullaby and Haunted. There are many things this book […]
Letting Go
December 1, 2010
That Philip Roth is one of the best writers alive may not be up for debate. There are those who might not be fans of his long-winded style, as well as many who believe his writing is chauvinistic. But even most critics of his work acknowledge his enormous stature in the modern American canon; he […]
My mom on Tao Lin
November 26, 2010
At the end of this past summer, I wrote a piece for Salon about the writer Tao Lin. After it ran, my mom became briefly interested in Lin, asked me a few questions and then forgot about him. But last week, she was at her local library and saw a copy of Lin’s new novel […]
Never Let Me Go, book vs. movie
October 27, 2009
This is a great novel and a terrific introduction to Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go really flows naturally, all under the narrator’s commanding voice, which is the book’s biggest strength. It eases you in, then surprises you. As for the plot “secret,” I’m not even sure I would tout that part of it when recommending […]
The Humbling
October 18, 2009
Philip Roth’s new novel has only been out a couple weeks now, but I knew I had to read it right away. It was a quick, breezy read—a tiny novella, like Indignation in its almost aggravating brevity—that only clocks in at 140 pages. And those are small pages with absurdly large type. To get to […]
Downtown Owl
October 8, 2009
Klosterman’s non-fiction is great, as so many of his fans know, but he has stuck with the same authorial voice for his first attempt at a novel, and it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t work, but still the novel manages to entertain. It grabs you, though you never get sucked in enough to ignore the […]
The Abstinence Teacher
December 26, 2008
I’m not quite sure what went wrong for author Tom Perrotta this time around. I happen to have really liked the two books I read by him before this one. Joe College was heartfelt, funny, and pretty deep for a story ostensibly about such lighthearted fare as college social life. And Little Children—I say this […]
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