I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and watched the movie) in university and loved it. But I’ve never read Kundera since. I saw this book in a local lawn library and picked it up, knowing nothing about it. I see why it’s interpreted as a political novel but I tend to agree with the blurb on …
Tag: Novels
The Lions of Al-Rassan (1996) by Guy Gavriel Kay
I read this book because Kay is my girlfriend’s favourite fantasy writer (and she really doesn’t like fantasy). I had really never heard of him before and didn’t fully realize he was Canadian. (Also, I knew nothing of his association with Tolkien.) I liked this book more than I thought I might, and more than …
Rainbows End (2006) by Vernor Vinge
I don’t read a lot of sci-fi or fantasy. And so quality of the dialogue is always a surprise to me when I do. For the first few chapters, I was kind of dying. I really thought about giving up. Vinge’s is dialogue is not great, at times reminding me too much of just about …
Freedom (2010) by Jonathan Franzen
Hot take: I enjoyed this more than The Corrections. Note: Very minor spoiler
The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen
Full disclosure: I suspect that, had I read this novel when it came out, I would have loved it. I would have found it funnier then than I found it now, I wouldn’t have noticed the misogyny I wouldn’t have cared an iota about the unlikable characters, and I probably wouldn’t have been aware of …
Tender is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Apparently I read this years ago and forgot. I wrote the following: “The same great qualities as with his other classics but lacking the completeness of The Great Gatsby. There are still moments of profound insight and lots of great description, but it lacks the earlier novel’s wholeness. I don’t mean to nitpick. It’s a great …
The Island of the Day Before (1995) by Umberto Eco
This is a weird one, full of all of Eco’s typical obsessions but lacking many of the things that make some of his novels classics or, at the very, least enjoyable. I have read just over half his novels now, and this is my least favourite by a considerable margin.
Of the Farm (1965) by John Updike
There is a genre in American drama in which a family get together or reunion builds to a emotional climax where everyone’s feelings are revealed. It is not a genre I love. I am familiar with many plays in this genre but, honestly, I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a novel in that genre …
The Return of the King (1955) by JRR Tolkien
I don’t remember much about the film of The Return of the King, except for what felt like eternal denouement. I don’t actually remember but, if memory serves, it felt as though the last 45 minutes of that film were devoted to wrapping things up. I was worried that this book would be the same and, …
The Plot Against America (2004)
This is a flawed but near-great alternative history of the United States in the first years of World War II that manages to be incredibly compelling and affecting even while you suspect the premise might be slightly implausible. However, Roth is such a good writer that you kind of stop caring and if his handling …
A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry
Every day, but especially days in December, I see someone in Canada or the US on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter who is complaining about how awful our world is. If it’s not an individual, it’s an article or other post about something terrible happening. And this really drives me crazy because I know that …
Runaway Horses (1969) by Yukio Mishima
All of us approach anything new from our frame of reference. And so I cannot help but liken this novel, the second part of a tetralogy the rest of which I haven’t read, to Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (aka Demons). It’s been years since I read it, but I felt strong echoes of it in this …
Space (1982) by James Michener
The older I get the more I seem to be winning the battle – or at least not losing the battle – with my completist streak. I am writing a review of this flawed novel after having read only 470 pages as a celebration of defeating my completist impulse yet again. I do not need …
Hawaii (1959) by James Michener
This was my first Michener, though I did read a novel called London, which was basically an imitation Michener, back when I was a teenager. My understanding is that he is very much the author of these alternative histories of given places. So I guess I had to read him at some point. But holy …
In Praise of Cultural Appropriation
This article is about the accusation of “cultural appropriation” being thrown around at works of art. I may not be entitled to write this.
Life of Pi (2001) by Yann Martel
This review contains major SPOILERS. Hype is a dangerous thing. I heard a lot about this book, all positive, and I heard it for what felt like years. In addition to the hype, I had some aspects of the plot spoiled for me by the existence of the movie. So, basically, I waited way too …
The Westing Game (1978) by Ellen Raskin
This is the kind of novel all kids should read. I am far too old for this type of book now but, as a child or tween, this would have been great. It feels like a legitimate game – it’s basically a far more complicated version of Clue, but with character development – and its …
The Golden Bowl (1904) by Henry James
At long last I am done with this tedious novel. But, I shouldn’t start this on a bad note, so let’s start with the positives:
The Ambassadors (1903) by Henry James
I hate giving up on a book – I just hate it. I have a really strong completist streak in me that has helped me endure through things I’ve really disliked. Since I graduated university I can count the number of books I’ve given up on, on one hand. Usually, it’s non-fiction (such as The …
A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) by Khaled Hosseini
This is, for the most part, a compelling, affecting and, at times, devastating novel of what it was like to live as a woman in Afghanistan for the last quarter century or so of the 20th century. It is particularly effective of giving insight into the men who hate women – into an entire society …
The Prodigy aka Beneath the Wheel (1906) by Hermann Hesse
This coming of age story is quite affecting and feels like a much better glimpse into the youth of a German male of the era than I am used to, either from Hesse himself or from someone like Thomas Mann.
Demian (1919) by Hermann Hesse
This is the kind of book I’d have eaten up when I was in my early 20s, I think. It’s one of those novels of ideas, and the ideas are vague enough that one can project one’s own feelings on them. That’s one reason it would have appealed to me. Also, I was a young …
The Art of Fielding (2011) by Chad Harbach
This is an excellent debut novel, featuring a richly constructed world and (mostly) believable characters. It works as both a baseball novel and a college novel. It has been a long time since I cared about characters this much.
Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Mellville
I discovered there was a free audio version of Moby Dick online, as a podcast, so I started listening to it. However, 3/4s through it, the site went down. So I resumed with an audio book from the library. I think listening to it was a mistake. I distracted myself too many times and missed …
The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford
Sometimes I can handle stories of the idle rich, sometimes I cannot. This is one of the latter, where I really struggled to care about any of the characters, their rich, bored lives and their endless emotional struggles with being rich and bored, and having to deal with each other.
Less than Zero (1985) by Bret Easton Ellis
On some level, this feels like an ’80s LA Catcher in the Rye, albeit with richer and older kids, and drugs and prostitution. I feel like this may have been Ellis’ intent, I also think that the acclaim that greeted it upon its release likely was due, in part to that comparison, however misguided.
Baudolino (2000) by Umberto Eco
This is a fairly uproarious comic novel about the fine line between truth and fiction, that also functions as a critique of medieval logic and reasoning and as a celebration/satire of the power of myth (and faith, and belief). But I felt a nagging sense of deja vu the entire time I was reading it.
Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks (2007) by Christopher Brookmyre
This is not only a well-done mystery but it is also a fine indictment of a certain kind of chicanery, one that drives me particularly crazy. SPOILERS
A Case of Need (1968) by Michael Crichton writing as Jeffery Hudson
This is a real page turner and it’s easy to see why it’s the book that properly launched Crichton’s career: it’s full of detailed information about contemporary medicine but Crichton uses that detail to drive the plot, not to overwhelm the reader in minutiae (as some “techno thriller” writers do). Though this type of thriller …
Adolphe (1816) by Benjamin Constant
Adolphe is an odd one: it’s a story of a romance with virtually no context. Sure, we get some idea of what Europe was like for a son of a wealthy family in the early 19th century. And, in one of the later chapters, Constant describes the physical geography of an area of Poland. But, …