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Pretty good, really! It is a bit tropey, the pirate mermaid is a good bit and some fun sociopolitical drama is scattered throughout, has a refreshing fantasy setting. I think, had I read this when I was younger, I would have loved it - but as it is, it did ring a little hollow, a little by-the-book, and when , 80% of the way in, I noticed that it was going to end on a cliffhanger setting up a sequel (series?) I was a bit disappointed. I'll probably read the next, would honestly expect to enjoy it more.

When it comes down to it, this is basically just Bleeding Edge but with more Genre. Enjoyable enough as a detective mystery, and the counterculture voice is kind of fun - and, as I listened to the audiobook, Ron McLarty's performance of the various Pynchonian songs and lyrical tidbits (that I normally end up skimming over) was a delight. I was generally expecting more, but probably would make a good gateway novel by him.

I think this is likely the best of Thomas Pynchon, one of the great novels of my lifetime, although I enjoyed his Bleeding Edge more. I don't know that I've read a better book that was written since I've been born. Better and good and great and enjoyable and exhilarating are all of course very different words, and it is for all of that not one of my favorite books, but. Masterful style, compelling history, quality story of Friendship and a pair in the lineage of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, awesome odyssey and the usual overbrimming of stories and side characters, framing devices and framed devices. It is, all in all, A Lot. But very good at it.

Reading this brought to mind Susan Sontag's On Photography, or at least what I remember of it/what I imagine it as saying, having read it a number of years ago. Not to say that they have anything in common or anything, but. What I imagine Sontag saying is something about the act of photography causing an incision between the realities of the viewer and the viewee. The photographer becomes the camera and the subject an object. What occurred to me reading this is that the same logic can apply just as well to writing about the act of photography - in examining photography, you loose the ability to do photography. This is a bit of a silly criticism of Sontag, but I think it points its finger towards ideas around non-fiction as a whole - writing about an experience, and especially planning to write about an experience, will color that experience, make it less Authentic.

I listened to Walden while walking through the woods around Walden, and I gotta say - the words still ring true. Yes, he was a few hours walk from Boston, yes his mom probably did his laundry for him and the whole experience is a bit silly on the face of it. But there is a pleasant earnestness and optimism to Thoreau's years in "the woods" that I can't help but admire.

A bit awkward at times, a bit of a mouthful, as perhaps waranted given centuries of separation. Like a young deer struggling to walk, there are moments of grace and wit that are astounding - but of course my metaphor is all wrong. From my perspective it seems that Cervantes stands at the very dawn of a process that eventually gives us Mel Brooks, but I am missing the context that makes him instead the culmination of all that went before. And with this perspective I enjoy it more as a pointer to what came later (that is to say, "wow! This must have been revolutionary in its time! It is so modern it is almost as funny and emotionally engaging as modern novels!"), and less on its own for its intrinsic merits (that is to say, "I would chose to read this book over others"). Which, to be fair and frank, its intrinsic merits are of course not lacking. Don Quixote is a great character, Sancho Panza possibly greater, and the book, of course, Great. But is it good?

Toni Morrison is perhaps the most powerful writer.

As a book, certainly a very good one, although as a Great Book I found it a bit middling. It has a certain uniqueness that is intriguing, a story that wavers and a temporality that wanes - and occasionally waxes - I guess it really is a Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp's journey to a sanitorium, to a lassitude and elongation of days, is at times all the things you need out of a book, deep and emotional and superficial and sad and light comedy and romantic and edifying or at least illustrative. Maybe it is that I took too much time reading it, but I think what it is missing is just not being lifechanging, at least for me. Certainly, though, a very good book.

The thing is, Gabriel García Márquez is tough competition. This is One Hundred Years of Solitude with worse writing and better politics, I am not likely the first to say, but the writing is in fact still briliant. The story is spectacular, intergenerational family epics are maybe my favorite genre? and in the end I cannot hold the mimicry against Allende. A wonderful book

An entirely self-indulgent conversation with a passionate believer in the wonder and the beauty of the natural world, full of excellent tidbits and charming vignettes, of life by the creek and Life by the Creek. I like the review that says "Just when you thought something interesting was going to happen she watches birds or something for hours." If you are looking for plot (and I do have a bit of a personal predilection/weakness in that direction) this is not where that will be found. It is instead a good book for telling you to go to the woods and front only the essential facts of life, for painting a golden aura around that which has the tendency to become mundane dirt, trees, sky. I find that some of the best books I read are those that inculcate a yearning for faith and belief in something greater, and this scratches that itch.