tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55971817782074806322024-09-04T15:10:16.128-07:00Here you will find: mainly book reviews, with some other assorted desultory ramblings. I look forward to your comments, whether constructive, damning, off-topic, or otherwise. Please enjoy!Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-59214107281963518752014-09-13T18:20:00.000-07:002014-09-13T18:20:24.793-07:00

After all these years (years?!), I'm back, with something not-quite-a-review. My favorite read of 2013 was "At Swim, Two Boys" by Jamie O'Neill. It would be a shame to add any words to the ones in this beautiful book. In lieu of a review, I give you this tiny taste of the book's majestic intimacy: “Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-48365831299163569702010-12-23T11:04:00.000-08:002010-12-23T11:04:22.086-08:00

Across the internet--my first post on Gongfu Girl, a photo essay from our first tasting of Den's Tea's sublime Kuradashi Sencha.

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-69573042517910780802010-12-20T20:54:00.000-08:002010-12-20T20:54:36.299-08:00

What fun!     The Awdrey-Gore Legacy is classic Gorey, and at first glance appears almost indistinguishable from the rest of Gorey’s oeuvre.  What makes this book stand out from the rest of Gorey’s work is that it is like a love letter to formulaic mysteries, replacing the usual sort of plot and sensible conclusion with a big, open sense of the hilarious oddness of the whole

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-55503641341414740272010-03-27T21:04:00.000-07:002010-03-27T21:11:30.008-07:00

Mostly a stranger to the "audio-book" format, I very much enjoyed the way this recording paced me through the text:  listening, I simply did not have the option of rushing through this or that little part of the novel, and thereby missing the detailed nuances of Isherwood's language that help make the whole work so powerful.  Encountering the text in this way, an experience

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-89651560198173392732010-02-14T16:20:00.000-08:002010-02-14T16:20:42.861-08:00

This book is something special, primarily for Gorey fans (this is admittedly true of everything he wrote). The book opens with a rare interview with Edward Gorey that is full of enchanting and informative tidbits; Gorey himself is charming and fun, as you would expect. The screenplay of "The Black Doll" is mysterious, macabre, and full of references to films both familiar and obscure.  It

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-48136947322116163342010-02-02T20:38:00.000-08:002010-02-02T20:38:35.336-08:00

Edmund White's City Boy is a memoir of the author's growth as a writer during the 1970s, primarily in New York. It is full of anecdotes and stories about real people--of varying degrees of fame--like Robert Wilson, James Merrill, William Burroughs, and Harold Brodkey, among many, many others. All of the characterizations are fascinating, capturing the particular impact that this or that person

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-44686446232255998292010-01-31T15:23:00.000-08:002010-01-31T15:23:03.564-08:00

Here, please enjoy nostalgic and fiercely maudlin documentary record in pictures of my once-favorite tiny piece of anonymous art: a pair of padlocks with hearts on them. Perhaps the spontaneous expression of a couple's desire to express a permanence of love that, like the MasterLock, could allow each participant in that love to withstand the bullets of fate; perhaps the expression of the

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-59180815067479276642010-01-29T09:39:00.000-08:002010-01-29T20:40:28.039-08:00

This book is a delicious, delicious treat, full of surprises.  I picked up The Show That Smells after reading the plot summary on Dennis Cooper’s blog (the book is published by Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series). I expected a delightful, quirky and enjoyably subversive summer read. I was completely unprepared for what this little book really is: startling, funny, full of

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-44253761645321649062010-01-27T13:34:00.001-08:002010-01-30T11:02:38.903-08:00

A little late--I want to call your attention to a wonderful poem: "Last Post" by Carol Ann Duffy, which appeared on the BBC online on August 6, 2009. My graduate thesis was about the "narratological implications of reversed time" in Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. By which I meant: how backwards is an important and effective way to tell stories about war and genocide, in that book and other

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-16261059778163009962010-01-27T12:27:00.000-08:002010-01-29T20:41:08.268-08:00

James Magruder's Sugarless is my favorite book of 2009. In the book, Rick--the narrator--looks back on a formative period in his life with astonishing insight and nostalgia, feeling again, through the telling of them, all of the thrills and anguish of becoming an adult. It offers the reader the vicarious pleasure of watching Rick negotiate his initiation into the sexual world, and then

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5597181778207480632.post-83087347442905078482010-01-27T11:58:00.000-08:002010-01-27T12:03:55.577-08:00

What, I'm blogging?Anyway... this will be a place where I post reviews of books: delicious, repulsive, mediocre, dull, exciting, trashy, or not covered by these categories. As with other blogs, I'm sure I will end up talking about other things, like films, or home repairs, or important union issues. Who knows? So here we go. It is worth mentioning that our library is on LibraryThing, at http:

Splendid Geryonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14716363526656145414noreply@blogger.com0