tags

modern

• May 19, 2023 If On The Winters Night A TravelerI was wondering a lot about greatness while reading this. I don't think Italo Calvino is one of the greats, but I do love what he does. There is something a bit Borgesian about this, maybe Kafkaesque or maybe a bit more delightfully Snicketesque, and I think Calvino almost earns his own adjectivification, but not quite. This is a series of beginnings, a collection of stories by an author that doesn't enjoy writing the ends, a love letter about reading and then on the contrarywise a bit about writing, like the man from Borges who determines to write Don Quixote or like the man from DFW who determines to make the ultimate entertainment or like the man from Nabokov who gets tangled in the endnotes of Pale Fire. All wrapped in a delightful second-person framing device of international intrigue, conspiracy, and apocrypha.
• May 19, 2023 UlyssesI mean I thought this was pretty great actually. Tedious, sure, full of itself, sure, riddled with references and languages I either got, or as may happen, did not. I'm fine with a bit of navel-gazing, I can appreciate it, but 800 pages is a lot of pages of naval-gazing. Thank god for the audiobook I guess, not sure I would have finished otherwise, and but does that even count? And I wasn't always sure of what was going on or when I was who. But for all that - some of the best prose, an amazing project, an Odyssey for our time, a century ago. I should probably read the Odyssey. I thought the ending a just about perfect ending making for it a just about perfect example of that which it is. The characters were adroitly captured, Dublin adroitly captured, the time, adroitly captured. I liked how the words went together, and they went together in some wild ways. Not my favorite novel, but at the same time maybe the best? I can see why it might be the best.
• Jun 24, 2023 Mason DixonI 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.