O Henry!

     For almost a week, I’ve been savoring each page of The Master, Colm Tóibín’s 2005 novel about the life of Henry James. When reading James, I’m often forced to slow down and read like a woman of one hundred years ago, someone with time, a quiet place, organized thoughts, and a more formal vocabulary. [...]

Read Full Post »

Some Clarity

What a week it has been. I fought rising fever and influenza until Thursday noon when I landed in bed and stayed for almost 24 hours. Wednesday evening, I had tried to read a bit of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu, but found it simplistically and flatly written. Unfortunate, for sure, as it’s [...]

Read Full Post »

Disgrace

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize winning novel about an academic spiraling from control, is a huge novel stated in just over 200 pages. And it’s spiraling from a state of controlling, not out of control, an important distinction within these taut pages. David, a 52-year old academic, finds himself on the outs of the [...]

Read Full Post »

Less is Moore

It’s exciting to be in Disgrace. Halfway through in just two reading sessions, and it’s simply wonderful. This is the first Coetzee for me and his cracklingly clean sentences are just the thing to launch this reader into spring mode. Last year at about this time, I read House of Meetingsby Martin Amis, tripping through [...]

Read Full Post »

Coming up for air

After spending almost a week struggling to find interludes of anything to enjoy about Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing, I have failed and am placing it back on the shelf. As a teenager, this brand of endlessly repetitive interior monologue might have held me fast. But, one of the most wonderful things about [...]

Read Full Post »