2014 Book #21: The Magicians
I’d seen The Magicians around the internet, marketed as a sort of Harry Potter for adults. It’s the first of yet another wizardy series, and despite my best judgment (and having read all of the Game of Thrones books available), I checked it out from the library. Here’s what happens: Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts, […]
2014 Book #20: A Dance with Dragons
I don’t have much to say about A Dance with Dragons. It’s the fifth book in George R.R. Martin‘s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and, as I’ve said before, once you get this far into a series, there is no review without spoilers. I also find that until the last book, the farther I get […]
2014 Book #19: The Inverted World
Wait, you ask, You just said you were reading A Dance with Dragons, so where’s that review? I know, I know. I suffer from a common library curse: as soon as I start reading a long book, my ILL requests come in. It happens all the time. Most of the time, that means that the ILL […]
2014 Book #18: In the Night of Time
I’m usually not one to read historical novels, but I kept running into In the Night of Time, and when I saw that the library happened to have it, I gave it a try. The book’s size is daunting at roughly the size of The Goldfinch. It’s also much more dense: words are packed onto pages in […]
A Really Long Post about Don DeLillo, which mentions 2014 Books #16 and 17: Mao II and Point Omega
The more I read (and reread) Don DeLillo‘s work, the more convinced I become that, in his lifetime, he has come up with one plot idea. That’s one reason I’m lumping these two books together. I’ve read both of them before: Point Omega twice, now, and Mao II four times. (Yes, four. And it’s not even DeLillo’s best […]
2014 Book #15: The Slynx
Well, The Slynx certainly was…interesting. I’m not quite sure what to think of it, though I liked it. It’s been on my TBR list for a year or two (I even included it in my TBR Pile Challenge!), though I’m not sure how it got there. I’m pretty sure it has to do with Skylark and NYRB […]
2014 Fail Pile #2: The People in the Trees
Remember how, after I read The Magus, I noted that, while I don’t mind challenging books, I don’t like books that are entirely, unequivocally, effed up? Yeah, well, note that I at least finished The Magus. I’m not finishing Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees. Here’s the blurb on Goodreads: “In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs […]
2014 Book #14: At Night We Walk in Circles
Until about the halfway point in At Night We Walk in Circles, I had a recurring sense of deja vu, but I couldn’t place it. I’ve read a lot about Central and South America and the prisons there, and the closest I could think of was Kiss of the Spider Woman or All the Pretty Horses. Eventually I got […]
2014 Book #13: Cosmicomics
I’m not sure how Italo Calvino made it onto my radar or, even, which of his books I read first. I vaguely remember copies of Mr. Palomar lying around my high school, but I didn’t read it until much later. I certainly wasn’t assigned him in college (as I wasn’t assigned Borges…). I haven’t even read […]
2014 Book #12: The Dark Tower
I’ll call this a review of The Dark Tower series rather than of the book itself. I don’t have too much to say about the latter. The series, though. Yes, indeed. I read The Gunslinger, the first book in the series, almost two years ago. I really liked it and continued. The Drawing of the Three, I thought, […]