Monthly Archives: September 2011
September 2011 Reads
That was a random picture of random books from my hard drive. Ahem. For posterity’s sake—what follows is the list of books I read this month. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. Moondogs, by Alexander Yates. The Long Weekend, by Adam David. How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, by Christopher Boucher. Everything […]
Starting out, doubling back
I make no progress with Patrick White’s Voss. At the end of every chapter I read, I go back and read it from the beginning, lingering over scenes and passages, adding to the annotations I’ve already littered the margins with. Technically, I am about to begin Chapter 6. But I’ve backtracked so many times, reliving pages—I’ve […]
The Engineheart of Christopher Boucher’s Debut
Dear How to Keep a Volkswagen Alive: What strange creature are you? What manner of sorcery, Christopher Boucher? So very strange, with its own dream-logic and its own contortions of language. It’s a world built on symbolism and puns and metaphors, and everything still makes sense, and it still manages to be affective. Maybe Kevin Thomas’ […]
Typhoon Reading
“When it comes to a good book, the good bits are always worth reading again.” – From The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton by Miranda Neville. I very much agree. No work yesterday on account of the rage of a typhoon. I mostly stayed in bed, huddled under a thin blanket, trying not to touch […]
From reading’s bygone days
There are books you read once and then put away on your shelf. You know that you will never have to read them again, although you may return to them to check certain points or to refresh your memory of certain ideas or episodes. (It is in the case of such books that the notes […]
I cannot, in good conscience, consider this my good book
I loved Simon Van Booy’s short stories. I distinctly remember loving the prose in his collection The Secret Lives of People in Love, give or take a few nausea-inducing missteps of the purple category; I distinctly remember loving how he put his characters in situations that showed best their hearts. These are the things I […]
