Now that I have a part-time job that seems to involve lots of sitting around in front of a computer, perhaps I'll start updating this journal a bit more frequently. This morning, while whiling away a few hours at "work," I finished Doctorow's fictional version of the Rosenberg trial. Actually, it's a book about life in the United States between ( Read more... )

Since my most recent post, for all its minimalism of content, was greeted with such warmth, I feel moved to post again. Moreover, this will be a completely non-literary entry. When I was walking up the stairs at the library today, I suddenly experienced an odd pain in my right knee. I managed to hobble over to my usual seat in the stacks, but my ( Read more... )

I realize that I haven't updated this blog in months. Apparently, I've lost interest in posting instant assessments of whatever books I happen to be reading. But I'll take advantage of being online to mention that this novel, the last work of the contemporary German author Gert Hofmann, is superb. I don't have much to say about it, save that it' ( Read more... )

Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Do people still find Rabelais engrossing? When I tried to read Gargantua and Pantagruel years ago, it was only a sense of duty to an alleged classic that impelled me to finish the first two books. I thought that perhaps the translation was at fault for my lack of interest, so I recently picked up Burton Raffel ( Read more... )

G. K. Chesterton, Twelve Types This is a collection of short essays on a variety of literary and historical figures. They are the quintessence of Chesterton: in each case, he takes a conventional opinion about a person and neatly shows that the exact opposite is in fact the "truth." Everyone says that Charles II was an indolent fool, but in fact ( Read more... )

I've just finished John Demos's recently-published Massey Lectures, which deal with "the shape of life in early America." For whatever reason, I've read most of the volumes in this series of lectures. My favorite, it perhaps goes without saying, is Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country. The others were either rambling (E. L. Doctorow's ( Read more... )

I've become increasingly derelict about maintaining this journal, partly because I've been doing other things (e.g. spending a week ambling through Berkeley), partly due to a larger lethargy. So it goes. To jump back into the swing of commentary: I've spent a substantial portion of the last three days reading the ten volumes of Roger Zelazny's ( Read more... )

To tell the truth, most nineteenth-century American novels aren't very good. With the exception of maybe a dozen great writers, the men and women who produced fiction in this country between 1800 and 1900 were not blessed with an overabundance of talent. One such minor figure, as I've recently found for myself, was Edward Eggleston. The Hoosier ( Read more... )

After expressing my contempt for Richard Powers's latest lifeless offering, it's a pleasure to pay tribute to a novelist who is competent to create representations of lifelike human beings. Having enjoyed Rush's most recent novel, Mortals, I read the rest of his corpus, which comprises all of two books: Whites, a collection of early stories, and ( Read more... )

It appears that I've allowed several weeks to lapse since I last updated this journal. Not that anyone necessarily cares, but I've been reading James; reading Emerson; preparing what my advisors tell me will be the last minor revisions before they approve my proposal. But this veritable maelstrom of activity -- by my minimal standards -- hasn't ( Read more... )