Page last updated:
I tend to be a voracious reader, and I read widely. This list has its origins in an old signature file which I would update periodically with the current book that I was reading. That gradually transmogrified itself into the current massive archive with brief reviews.
| What I've been reading lately |
| Number of books read and reviewed each year | |
|---|---|
| 1995* |  (28) |
| 1996 | (47) |
| 1997 | (74) |
| 1998 | (61) |
| 1999 | (62) |
| 2000 | (27) |
| 2001 | (51) |
| 2002 | (60) |
| 2003 | (37) |
| 2004 | (36) |
| 2005 | (32) |
| 2006 | (46) |
| 2007 | (109) |
| 2008 | (78) |
| 2009 |  (17) |
| * Partial year | |
[Finished 14 June 2009] A wonderfully anarchic novel. A lot of it is disconnected, but it seems to do an excellent job of capturing the pointlessness of war.
[Finished 27 May 2009] (I listened to this book as a free promotional download from audible.com.) Plotz, like many Americans, had never really read the Bible, but only knew it in bits and pieces from Hebrew school and popular culture. What he set out to do here was to provide a naïve perspective on scripture, writing about what someone who didn’t have a strong religious background or access to Biblical scholarship would make of the Bible. When I first read the Bible, I read the New Jerusalem Bible which incorporates significant commentary throughout, which meant, among other things, that I knew about the JEPD theory of the origins of the Pentateuch, and there are many times that I found myself frustrated by Plotz’s naïveté in understanding some of the text, but even so, it was an entertaining read, although Plotz’s tendency to snarkiness was more distracting than entertaining.
Plotz’s big takeaway from reading the Bible was twofold: One was that he became appreciative of how much our culture was dependent on the Bible for many of its references (although I think some of the connections he makes may be spurious), the other was how it made him really address his own Jewish heritage.
[Finished 14 May 2009] A bit disappointingly thin. I felt like there was a great deal more that could be said on the subject than Balmer does, and was left wondering why he couldn’t have written more on the topic.
For example, a single chapter covers religion and presidential politics from Alfred Smith through Kennedy, and it seemed like we were rushing through each presidency thereafter.
[Finished 11 May 2009] The main reason I picked up the book is that the author is my brother’s writing partner and on my brother’s last trip to town, Arnold gave me a copy of the book.
That said, this is a reasonably entertaining and well-written book, aimed at middle grades. There’s a tendency at times to write down a little to the audience, but overall it’s a fun and entertaining little book, the sort of thing that I can see really capturing a kid’s imagination. The book includes the opening chapter of the planned sequel, ESPete: Psychic Hoop Dreams.
[Finished 9 May 2009] It’s rare that I get towards the end of a book and deliberately slow down my reading because I don’t want the book to end. But this time, I had been so captivated by Ishiguro’s narration that I couldn’t bring myself not to.
This is, I suppose, a work of literary science fiction, and from the beginning with the familiar yet unfamiliar vocabulary, I could tell that there was something a bit different about the world that Ishiguro was depicting (I knew nothing about the book when I began reading it), which is actually precisely the sort of science fiction-ish narrative that I really enjoy.
I think some of it is the almost emotionally flat narrative, something which didn’t work in the screen adaptation of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (I’ve not read the novel, so I can’t comment on that), but in this context serves, ironically, to heighten the emotional content of the story.
Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene
[Finished 8 May 2009] This, apparently, is considered a minor work in Greene’s canon, having fallen out of print and not meriting any mention at all on Norman Sherry’s biography of Greene.
But it seems like this is a somewhat misplaced view of things. Yes, there are some clumsy characterizations in the novel, but at the same time, the philosophy of the narrator rivals Querry’s in its pessimism, the concept of a God who exists primarily to humiliate his creation, does provide a fascinating view into Greene’s state of mind at this stage of his life. It’s interesting to note that Greene’s next novel would be Monsignor Quixote.
[Finished 7 May 2009] It’s been a while since I’ve read any Farrell. I remember being absolutely captivated by Studs Lonnigan, so I was more than happy to start the Danny O’Neill pentalogy a few years back before discovering that most of Farrell’s works had fallen out of print. Now they’ve come back into print so I’m able to easily obtain copies of the books on the pentalogy that I didn’t have and I’m back into it. What’s interesting is that despite the sometimes clumsy narration (when a character is first introduced, we get a description that seems more like what you’d find in stage directions than in a novel), there’s a compelling voice here, especially in the rendering of dialogue. The plot such as it is, is a bit wandering and undirected with no real protagonist for the action to be centered on (is Danny meant to be the central character? Or Margaret? Or Mother? Or is it the family in general?), but even so, the narrative voice is enough to keep the reader propelled through the story.
[Finished 4 May 2009] This book reads like a first draft typed out on a benzedrine high, but oh my, what an amazing first draft it is. The incredible compelling voice here grabbed me and never let me go through the whole story. The madness and energy of Dean Moriarty are addictive and it’s easy to see our narrator drawn into the adventures that Moriarty instigates as well as setting off on some of his own. Could it be a more polished narrative? Sure, but it would at the same time lose some of the energy of the book. It makes me tempted to re-read the book in the scroll edition.
[Finished 30 April 2009] There are those occasional works of literature which are widely acclaimed as great, but which manage to leave some readers cold. For me, this is one of them. I can see some of the flashes of brilliance in this book, particularly, the account of the burning of the synagogue, and elements of the surrealist narration, but too much of it just seemed to drag and not be that interesting. That said, even in a book like this, I find some small inspiration for a bit of formation of future writing.
[Finished 17 April 2009] I remember being puzzled when I bought this book that it wasn’t a Penguin paperback like all my other Graham Greene novels. Only later did I learn that a conflict over the title of the book led Greene to change publishers with the publication of this book.
Re-reading it with a memory of the vague outline of the plot took away some of the suspense of the story, but allowed me to really enjoy how Greene unfolded character and mood. I did find the Catholic “furniture” in the story to be an odd diversion in the story, the metaphors and confession scene seemed to be completely out of place.