Tag Archives: book blogging

Interlude: end of Q2 (year 3!) at the Masthead!

Posted on by under End of Quarter: books reviewed, Uncategorized

Monday, July 15, marked the halfway point in the Masthead’s third year of book reviews…a slow quarter, but nonfiction does that to me (that, and giving much more of my time to newspaper journalism)! Still writing, still reading, still fascinated by Rockefeller. And, unrelated, far too excited about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing!

But back to the books: Here’s a looksie at the past three months and a good prayer the next three will bring a few more than two!

Books reviewed: 2 (I am a little ashamed 😳)
Translated fiction: 1 (from Ukrainian)
New-to-me authors: 1 (Andrey Kurkov)
Oldest AND newest book: both Grace and Penguin were published in 1996
Longest book: Atwood’s Alias Grace (567 pages)
Shortest book: Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin (228 pages)

Kurkov, Death and the Penguin
Alias Grace

Death and the Penguin, Andrey Kurkov
Kurkov’s novel of post-Soviet Ukraine is of a feeling that might usually be thought impossible: a schizoid optimism.

Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s double murder mystery is taken from history, but her story of Grace Marks missed the mark. Grace makes for okay reading but only if you’re not aware of what this woman can do.

♠

Browse the Review Archive
2019 mini reviews:
Quarter 1
2018 mini reviews:
Quarter 1
Quarter 2
Quarter 3
Quarter 4
2017 mini reviews:
Quarter 1
Quarter 2
Quarter 3
Quarter 4

 

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Posted on by under Reviews

For an author known to upend the conventional to suit her purpose, Margaret Atwood missed the mark with Alias Grace. History called the shots in this one, and perhaps such a restraint proved too large a hurdle.

Alias GraceAlias Grace · Margaret Atwood · 1996
Emblem, 2014 · 567 pages, paperback

♠

The 1843 murder of the gentleman Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper mistress Nancy Montgomery is lifted from the historical record, along with the characters of Grace Marks, the titular murderess, and James McDermott, her alleged co-conspirator.

Ripe and festering with a young girl’s maligned reputation, shifting identities, lunacy and crime, the Kinnear-Montgomery double murder should have been putty in the hands of Atwood, normally a convincing author as well as temptress to the imagination and one who has tricks for curling the corners of her sentences into sly little images…but putty it proved not to be. Continue reading →

A savage sentience: Roberto Bolaño

Posted on by under Currently Reading & TBR, Uncategorized

I came across this bit by Seth Riley over at The Millions, and boy…he gets it. I’d like to buy the guy a drink because who else is going to talk desert murders, prison violence and fetishized torment with me (and endure all the fevers and all the kicks and punches only to laud the cause of them afterward)? As Riley knows, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is a book that splits you open and tears you up. I’m still turning the thing this way and that long after reviewing it late in 2017 and giving Bolaño top marks for ingenuity.

Since then I’ve added his Third Reich and The Insufferable Goucho to my collection. I guess I don’t hold a grudge for pain inflicted.

 

Addendum/Edited to add…from the comments to Riley’s piece:

Both books [2666 and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian] are kind of like moral tests, and if you keep reading through the dead babies hung on trees and sequences of rapes and murders, it’s almost like you’ve failed the test. I keep on failing. It’s gruesome, it’s horrific, but I can’t turn away.

…I think this John Fox guy gets it, too.

 

 

Penguin and paranoia in post-Soviet Ukraine

Posted on by under Reviews

Death and the Penguin is a game of chance played with a stacked deck – and against a card sharp no less, one who turns the tables on this writer of obelisks. Andrey Kurkov’s novel has the sullen resentment of living fairly in an unfair world, and it has a dark humor to combat that same resentment. It’s also one that might make the lonely feel a little less alone.

Kurkov, Death and the PenguinDeath and the Penguin · Andrey Kurkov · 1996
George Bird translation · Vintage, 2001 · 228 pages, Paperback

♠

When you do know what’s what, it will mean there no longer is any real point to your work or to your continuing existence.

Viktor Zolotaryov writes obituaries of deputies, military officials, businessmen and others of VIP caliber in Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov’s novel Death and the Penguin. But the obituaries have a predetermined publication date – that list of notables from which Viktor has been taking his assignments is also a hitman’s register. Continue reading →

Interlude: end of Q1 (year 3!) at the Masthead!

Posted on by under End of Quarter: books reviewed, Uncategorized

April 15, 2019, marks the end of the Masthead’s first quarter to its third year celebrating the writer and his work through book reviews. Here’s a recap of the past three months:

Books reviewed: 5 (3 novels, 1 short story collection and 1 book of poetry)
Translated fiction: 2 (from 2 languages, Russian and German)
New-to-me authors: 5 (that’s every last one of ’em!)
Oldest book: Gogol’s collected fiction (1830-’42)
Newest book:  Zinovieff’s Putney (2018)
Longest book: Grass’ The Tin Drum and Gogol’s collected fiction (465 pages)
Shortest book: Daley-Ward’s Bone (160 pages)

As per usual, here’s a quick look at each book read and reviewed here since January 15:

Daley-Ward, Bone
Annihilation
zinovieff, putney
Grass Tin Drum
Gogol, Collected Tales

Putney, Sofka Zinovieff
Though she took up the challenge of writing on a difficult topic – child sexual abuse and statutory rape – Zinovieff’s novel flatlines as forgettable and unemotional.

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol had a puckish devil-may-care attitude to the world around him, and he wrote with a keen observer’s eye to provincial customs and city life alike. The short fiction compiled here is a perfect blend of magic and reality – enjoy the ride.

Bone, Yrsa Daley-Ward
Still fresh to the literary scene, Daley-Ward’s first poetry collection is highly autobiographical but still universal in its feeling. Broken bones, mended.

Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation is eco literature without an axe to grind, and VanderMeer’s first novel to his Southern Reach trilogy shows the man’s awe of the natural world, his grasp of human psychology and his ability to write fluidly.

The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
A German Crime and Punishment and allegory on top of allegory, Grass’ major opus of wartime Poland is difficult and entirely worth it.

♠

Browse the Review Archive
2018 mini reviews:
Quarter 1
Quarter 2
Quarter 3
Quarter 4
2017 mini reviews:
Quarter 1
Quarter 2
Quarter 3
Quarter 4

 

Novelists are some smart folks

Posted on by under Uncategorized

You know how people say that you don’t really understand complex somethings until you can parse those somethings down into things any dummy can grasp? That’s how I feel about a novelist who can put big ideas into a good story. Philosophy is one thing, but philosophy placed in a physical world, with no dialectics and no arguments but just so – and then given life through characters – is quite another.

Year in review: best books of 2018

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I’m doing this a little differently than last year. My 2018 reading year was one of five standouts, a handful of good reads and a string of books that, for of the most part, lolled about, neither good nor bad but certainly indifferent to taking a shot at greatness.

I had to do something to add a little year-end spice to the list because the same mentions for everything just isn’t all that fun, is it? I scrapped the 5-4-3-2-1 format of 2017 as well as my separate review of authors. Neither was going to work for the 2018 year-end recap.

Apart from the two disappointments of the year (obv), take each category below as a recommendation. Teaser? 2018 gave me a new all-time favorite novel.

So here goes: what was tops  in 2018?

Continue reading →

End credits: books read 2018

Posted on by under Uncategorized

 

The Long Valley
John Steinbeck

Orient Express
Graham Greene

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Susanna Clarke

Thank You for Smoking
Christopher Buckley

The Fishermen
Chigozie Obioma

The Little Friend
Donna Tartt

The Kreuzer Sonata
Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Kokoro
Natsume Soseki

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick

The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas

1984
George Orwell

The Stand
Stephen King

This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Makioka Sisters
Junichirō Tanizaki

Mrs. Rosie and the Priest
Boccaccio

Comemadre
Roque Larraquy

The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann

Red Sparrow
Jason Matthews

The Giver
Lois Lowry

The Three Theban Plays
Sophocles

The Adolescent
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Still Life with Woodpecker
Tom Robbins

The Essex Serpent
Sarah Perry

Happy New Year!

Sarah Perry, the Essex Serpent

Posted on by under Reviews

Sarah Perry’s Essex Serpent is a bizarre tale. It’s bizarre not because of its serpentine mystery, but because it’s a good novel when everything about it would say otherwise.

Sarah Perry, the Essex SerpentThe Essex Serpent · Sarah Perry
Custom House, 2016 · 417 pages, hardcover

♠

You couldn’t say that The Essex Serpent is historical fiction or mystery or thriller, nor does it have a Victorian pastiche or the effervescent pall of a fantasy about it. Or it does, but not quite. It’s a curious novel but one clearly meant for the present day, the present year, a sort of amalgamation of past place and present principle. It’s odd. Continue reading →