Equivocality

I have just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Minority Report and Other Classic Stories. This is my first exposure to the infamous Phillip K.Dick, and I must say he makes me uneasy. Not much literature does, but these stories had me feeling strangely paranoid and disturbed in many places. For that I [...]

Is this guy still writing books? Well, I can see why. I Am Charlotte Simmons was published in 2004 when he was 73 years old. It’s a story set in contemporary American college life. It matches well my own university experience of ten years ago, and for the most part it reads as completely real.

I have just finished Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The Kalahari Typing School for Men. This is one of the books in a series called The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, and like all of the books in this series, it is set in Botswana, where Smith was born.

It’s a pleasant enough read, apparently aimed [...]

This is the second Murakami book I’ve read. I found this book intriguing, certainly, and it kept my attention, but it was also a little empty for me somehow, not quite as substantive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Imaginative, but a little too predictable I guess. In particular, the way his characters think or say very deep things in sometimes very trite words annoys me. To take a concrete example, see first few pages of book. “A dark, omnipresent pool of water,” he writes. Or see the climatic moment when Kafka forgives his mother. “Mother, you say, I forgive you. And with those words, audibly, the frozen part of your heart dissolves.” Of course, both of these lines were actually spoken by a character called The Boy Named Crow, who is “a theorizing crow,” who perhaps has license to say such melodramatic things.

Yet this spirit overlaps with something I do like about the book, the central dreaminess of it, best summed up when someone quotes Goethe: “Everything’s a metaphor.”

“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about,” says Lord Henry, the subversive nobleman, and this sums exactly one half of the book – by far the larger half. Hedonism is the only worthy philosophy, and decadence can be an art form: that is the argument here. And oh, Wilde makes it so [...]

(English translation by Natasha Wimmer)
This is a truly dirty book, in that almost every one of its short vignettes contains some sort of sweaty, often grotesque sex. The author is a pervert, and not a terribly creative one, really – there’s far more illuminating writing on sex elsewhere. That’s fine. The sex is merely [...]

This book is awesomely well written, deeply human, and ultimately also a little bit of a disappointment to me.
It’s basically the study of a woman trying to find a home in the world. After failing at or tiring of several different things, Codi Noline returns to her hometown of Grace, Arizona to care for her [...]

This is an account of the practice of neurosurgery and, equally interesting, the lifestyle of a neurosurgeon. There is some interesting technical detail here about what it is in fact that “brain surgery” consists of, and I will say that I learned some things about neuroanatomy, disease, and surgical technique.
For me, the more intriguing material [...]

This book is the story of a Scotsman who walked across central Afghanistan, 800 kilometers from Heart to Kabul, in January of 2002. He writes of his various adventures, including the peasants, soldiers, village headman, imam and Taliban that he meets, and he discusses the complex history of each place he passes. He visits ancient [...]

This is the first Hemmingway I’ve read, and oddly enough the last book he wrote before his death. The preface notes that it concerns the years 1921-1926 in Paris, so I was eager to see how it compares to Tropic of Cancer, which covers the same time and place. Tropic of Cancer is a much [...]