https://youtu.be/B7nV20cD6ec This book has got me in a bind. It’s easy to relegate it to one of two neat classifications: either a straight-faced satire that takes the piss out of the military-industrial complex; or else, a fully realised celebration of the serving man’s fraternity, of the sacrifice of the individual for the collective’s greater good,... Continue Reading →
The classics, Dear Reader! They possess a foundational cultural force, are the prism through which we can understand much about a society at a certain point in time, and are often inextricably linked with imperial values (you can find more about this last point in Frank Kermode's book, The Classic, as David Damrosch points out... Continue Reading →
Humbert Humbert, my friend, you monstrous motherfucker--sharing a ride in your twisted head has been a trip, a trip and a half. Kind of trip that had me laughing in-between bouts of revulsion and downright disgust. What else can you feel when you read sentences like these: I could switch in the course of the... Continue Reading →
Stoner is one of the two books I've decided to write my thesis on, come next term. It's that rare thing, a work that perfectly encompases the full strengths of the novel as a form. It's worth deeper study. So, then, this will be a short review -- I'd hate to be caught plagiarising my... Continue Reading →
This is my penultimate Philip Marlowe novel and I am so happy with it, you guys. The Little Sister is as self-reflective, exhausted and close to broken that I've seen Raymond Chandler's PI get. He's not having an easy time with what promised to be a simple enough missing person case, full of deceptive femme... Continue Reading →
I finished Joseph Heller's Catch-22 many months ago -- I've kept pushing the review further and further off because this is one of the classics, it's loved by many, disliked by some, downright hated by a chosen few. I find myself decidedly in the camp of the first, as this novel illustrated the absurdism of... Continue Reading →
I'm making a point of examining the great surviving tragedies of Ancient Greece. The time was right, I knew, when a Signet Classics edition of Euripides: Ten Plays looked at me invitingly from a shelf in the Sofia Airport bookstore this January. It's a wonderful pocket edition, and it set me back by three euro.... Continue Reading →
What's there to say about this one that hasn't been said before? Vonnegut is among the quintessential American authors, someone who, despite writing science fiction, transcended the stigmata of SF without difficulty, entered popular American consciousness and hasn't left it since. Its message strongly abhors the very notion of war, decries the brutalities of it... Continue Reading →
Ah, literary realism, how thou mildly interests me. Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns is a painfully middle-class English novel, with all that entails. What's that, I hear you ask -- and I'm all too happy to provide as long-winded an explanation as some of the descriptions within the novel. Before that, however, I... Continue Reading →
The Grimoire Reliquary 