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Reviews
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05.01.11Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, MarriageDeception It had all begun with Sabitha saying, on the way to school, "We have to go by the Post Office. I have to send a letter to my dad." There are a lot of things to note about "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," the title story of Alice Munro's tenth collection: her handing of perspective, the way she sketches just enough setting to bring post-war Saskatchewan to life, how she illuminates a character through their reflections on other characters. But what makes it most interesting from a writer's perspective is how she builds the story around a deception that is never ...
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04.17.11The MagiciansThat's what makes you different from the rest of us, Quentin. You actually still believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean we all know magic is real. But you really believe in it. Don't you.The Magicians by Lev GrossmanLev Grossman's The Magicians offers a fantasy world cribbed heavily (and quite openly) from the Harry Potter and Narnia books: schools for magicians, portals to magical realms, a gang of school chums who face danger and adventure together. But Grossman's world is more emotionally and morally fraught that Narnia and Hogwarts: the characters are a little ...
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02.06.11Claustrophobia in spaceMy Netflix account is used mostly for the boys to watch "Mythbusters" on demand and Kelly to get her British crime dramas. But lately the dog, who has never really got the concept of weekends and is sliding toward doggy dementia in spite of her senior blend food with fish oil, has been getting me out of bed at 5:30 AM on Saturdays and Sundays, so I've been taking advantage of the lack of competition to watch some movies that no one else in the family would like. Inspired by Jason Pettus at the Chicago Center for Literature and ...
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01.16.11Hull Zero Three"What is conscience?" the voice asks...."The willingness to sacrifice for a greater good," I say."Sacrifice what?""Dreams. Plans. Personal stuff." Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear Warning: spoilers inherent in this Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three is science fiction at its best: it is shaped by big ideas, is filled with technical puzzles, and asks questions about the future of humankind as well as the future of humanity (by "humankind" I mean the trajectory of DNA that includes our species; by "humanity," the moral and emotional components that have been carried along with that DNA for the last 50,000 years or so). ...
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12.11.10a year in reading, 2010photo by happy viaAs 2010 comes to a close (with over a foot of snow and more coming down outside my window), I'm looking back over some of the books and such I've enjoyed; there have been some great and thought-provoking reads in the last year, and some that were pretty good but didn't quite hit their potential. All in all, though, a good year for reading. Here are some of the books and articles that have made their way to these pages this year. I closed 2009 and started 2010 with Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, the ...
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11.27.10The Word for World is Forest"Wonderful," Lepennon said, and his white skin paled further with pure excitement. "A human society with an effective war-barrier! What's the cost, Dr. Lyubov?"The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin Reading Le Guin's novella "The Word for World is Forest" in 2010, it's hard not to draw the parallels with James Cameron's "Avatar": an exploitative colonial force of humans encounters a technologically primitive but psychologically advanced people on a paradisiacal world, and the encounter forces the peaceful natives to take up arms against the invaders. Le Guin's Athsheans differ from Cameron's Na'vi in more than appearance, ...
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11.21.10How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional UniverseI fix time machines during the day (whatever a day means for me--I'm not sure I even know that anymore), and at night I sleep alone, in a quiet, nameless, dateless day that I found, tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space-time. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu Charles Yu's "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" uses the tropes of science fiction to explore questions of identity, memory, and loss. Though wrapped in the trappings of science fiction, with various time-travel paradoxes playing a part in the plot, the novel is really ...
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11.21.10The LampshadeWith this lampshade you can say it had a first history, which is that identification with the Buchenwald camp and people like Isle Koch. ... Then there is the second history. The history with you. Your adventures and your thoughts. There is the strange and frightening idea that someone would make a lampshade out of a person and it has arrived in New Orleans after a storm. Mark Jacobson, a New York Magazine writer who splits his time between New Orleans and New York City, acquired, third-hand, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a lampshade apparently made ...
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06.27.10Ill Fares the LandThe materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth. Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land is the perfect companion, and foil, to Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion. Where Hedges' essay is a Jeremiad against the specific ills of contemporary culture, ...
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05.16.10Free Fruit for Young WidowsHe made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end. Nathan Englander's Free Fruit for Young Widows is more parable than story, sketching two acts of brutal self-preservation--one at the end of World War II, one during the Suez Crisis--and the very different reactions of two men. The characters, though, are more fully realized than is typical of a parable, and the result is a haunting story ...
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