Category Archives: Reviews - Facing Out
Pocket Review: The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
Physically and in its narrative structure, Zachary Mason’s first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reminds me very much of Einstein’s Dreams. Even the authors come from similar environments, Alan Lightman being a physics professor at MIT and Mason an AI computer scientist who once taught at Oxford. Both books are short, with Lightman’s [...]
Pocket Review: The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo
It’s been a while since I had small fry around, and I’m not much in the habit of reading children’s or YA books these days. But back when I had a captive audience, I remember that we both liked our tales with some edge—a little dark humor, a little melancholy. To this day I can’t [...]
New Yorker fiction (Jan 18) – “A Death in Kitchawank”
As if we needed any prompting to consider again our stance in the midst of life’s vagaries, along comes a smooth and elegant story from T. Coraghessan Boyle that pushes its readers to do just that.
The life and times of a lakefront neighborhood are depicted in brisk and sweeping brush strokes over the course of [...]
Review Redux 1-25-10
A great title like Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human deserves equally fine content, and the Australian’s Jose Borghino thinks Richard Wrangham’s book qualifies: “The best kind of scientific writing: clear, strongly argued and provocative. That it’s still contentious makes it all the more exciting.” Contentious? Yes, I’d say so. Wrangham’s interpretation includes this [...]
New Yorker fiction (Jan 11) – “Safari”
From the cushioned banality of my desk chair, I imagine a safari.
I envision the expedition, the explorers, the event itself.
I imagine the lists of provisions, the selection of gear, the requisitioning of Jeeps.
An itinerary’s iterations? I imagine them, too.
I gaze across the ocean at that distant Dark Continent, wondering if noble pad-pawed predators will become [...]
New Yorker fiction (Jan 4) – “Baptizing the Gun”
A female passenger starts to scream in the molue, or you-beat-me-I-beat-you bus, in front of my battered red Volkswagen Beetle, introducing another ripple of confusion into the midmorning Lagos traffic.
And with that opening line, you’re immersed immediately into the hot, buttered chaos of a common African maelstrom, the traffic jam. A Catholic priest has driven from [...]
Review Redux 1-4-10
I’m grateful the Guardian’s reviewer, Ian Thomson, quite likes Are We Related?: The New Granta Book of the Family. I was going to include his review no matter what, since it would permit me to recall that wonderfully (in)famous Granta #37, also about The Family, illustrated by the also (in)famous Philip Larkin poem. And, bless [...]
The Best of “The Best Of”
Changing your mind is how you know it’s open, right? So this year I’ve decided that, after many seasons of sniffy pronouncements to the contrary, I DO in fact like all those year-end best book lists. I like them very much indeed. With qualifications, of course. But still.
The old argument as to whether book [...]
Pocket Review: The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey
Rick Yancey’s novel comes to us from the YA shelves. Normally, I’d ask myself, “Why are you reading this? Shouldn’t you be reading something more… mature?” I don’t even think there was such a classification when I was a YA—when was that again? And what is a Young Adult anyway? Who is this target [...]
Review Redux 12-14-09
Hermione Lee has the great good sense to use the publication of Love of the World: Essays to give us a mini-critique of John McGahern’s life and work in the Times Literary Supplement—and it is a thing of beauty and enlightenment. If you’ve not read McGahern before, you surely will now.
Much of McGahern’s Ireland [...]
