February 2012
5 posts
2 tags
Thought for the evening: I am very sick of the “What we talk about when we talk about ________” title format. It was great the first time but now it is just tiresome and derivative; anything with this title actually encourages me not to read the work because I’m shallowly contrary like that.
3 tags
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami | Quarterly Conversation →
“Such outsized love stories as which Murakami embarks on in 1Q84 must be treated with extreme diligence, as they present sizable problems vis a vis believability, melodrama, and sentimentality. Murakami founders upon all three. It may sound ironic that a writer who indulges in the surreal as casually as Murakami would butt up against the problem of believability, but in attempting to piece...
2 tags
January 2012
13 posts
1 tag
Rain Light
by W. S. Merwin
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long...
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With...”
– Carson McCullers (via psychotherapy) (via stephaniesays)
Oh Carson.
zanmcquade replied to your link: Here Comes the Rooster - The Morning News
If The Marriage Plot wins I will be very, very disappointed in all of the judges. Harbach all the way.
I haven’t yet read The Art of Fielding so probably I shouldn’t say anything until next week or so when I do get to it. However, I love talking confidently about books that I know nothing about, so I...
1 tag
Here Comes the Rooster - The Morning News →
(Even though I think this list is kind of horrible but what can you expect, it was a poor publishing year) I am spasming about with glee tonight. The Rooster is the most fun on the internet in March for bookish types and I’ve been looking forward to it for months now. I’ve read 7 1/2 of these already and will, of course, read the rest, even the ones that give me hives to even...
“From the time I learned to love Jade and was drawn into the life of the...”
– Endless Love, Scott Spencer
December 2011
13 posts
1 tag
“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who...”
– David Foster Wallace, from an interview with Larry McCaffery for The Review of Contemporary Fiction, collected in Conversations with David Foster Wallace but also available online
He says this often in different words, sometimes dubbing “suffering” with “loneliness.” In...
4 tags
“So now [the days] were going to continue one after another like this, always the...”
– Madame Bovary, Flaubert, p. 54 of the beautiful Lydia Davis translation
Today is Flaubert’s birthday. I discovered this by chance after purchasing Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot at work, which inspired me to do some biographical digging on the great realist himself—this...
5 tags
November 2011
10 posts
1 tag
[I Failed Him and He Failed Me]
[I Failed Him and He Failed Me] by Katie Ford I failed him and he failed me— Together our skinned glance makes a sorry bridge For some frail specter who can’t get through. I failed him but maybe it was the lamp that failed, Maybe it was the meal, Maybe it was the potter Who would not intervene, maybe the clay, Maybe the plateau’s topaz, too steady to help, Or was...
“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality...”
– Middlemarch, George Eliot! It’s only been a year but I’m getting a strong reread urge.
3 tags
October 2011
16 posts
1 tag
1 tag
