Things I’ve Learned Recently
The return of Gobbledygook.
A Good Smucking Book
A brief review of Stephen King’s novel, Lisey’s Story.
No Genius Here
In which I review Harold Bloom’s book, “Genius.”
Happy 200th Birthday, Abe
From Flashlight Worthy’s Everything I Needed to Know About Abe Lincoln, I Learned From This Book List: “2009 marks the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. As such, those who enjoy studying Lincoln are enjoying a large crop of new books. Unfortunately, many people only receive boilerplate information. This list represents general biographies, but also goes [...]
If you’re a reader, read this.
From Ars Technica’s The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age: “A veteran of a former turning of the e-book wheel looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books.”
Good Reads Review: Gravity’s Rainbow
My Rating: 1 of 5 stars
Okay, I’ve tried reading this book a couple of times now. This last time I got to about page 250 before I decided it just wasn’t doing it for me.
I know this is supposed to be one of the best books of the 20th century and all, but I just [...]
The Future of the Book
From James Gleick’s How to Publish Without Perishing: “One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines: the Web pages, the blogs, the organs of printed and broadcast news, the general chatter. (Thanks for everything, [...]
Dreams Made Real
{or} The Tragedy of the Atlantic Ocean
Allusions to the Garden of Eden are rampant in Part One of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, but they are sparse in Part Two. In this annotation, I will try to understand why, and what the difference may mean.
The first allusion occurs on the very first page of the novel proper, in the introductory section of Part [...]
Read A Banned Book
From TIME’s Censorship in Modern Times: “Since 1982, the American Library Association has sponsored Banned Books Week to pay tribute to free speech and open libraries. The tradition began as a nod to how far society has come since 1557, when Pope Paul IV first established The Index of Prohibited Books to protect Catholics from [...]
The other other thing
I want to write an annotation that argues with Annie Dillard’s theodicy, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I want to argue with it because I think it says, with Leibniz, that despite the presence of evil, “this universe must be indeed better than every other possible universe” (Leibniz, 377), and that argument was parodied to [...]
