Monthly Archives: June 2013

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. Harper Perennial Toronto 2011 (first published 1998). F; 06/13 When you write, even my kind of sincere amateur nonfiction, once in awhile reading something really good (really creative, effortlessly resonant, wonderfully ranging imagination at work) you … Continue reading →

Banville, John. The Infinities. Vintage paper New York, 2009. F; 06/13 I remember being very impressed with The Sea. This one however missed me by a pretty safe margin. It felt like picking through a fabulous museum after a tornado. The wonderful … Continue reading →

Crichton, Michael. State of Fear. 2004. F; 12/05 This thriller barely holds interest with respect to plot. But Crichton takes a (to me) surprising anti-environmentalist point of view. The take-home point is that he claims that agnosticism is the proper … Continue reading →

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. 2004. F; 1/06. Terrific fiction, even though just occasionally a bit heavy going. The narrator has to be challenging for a modern female author: male, and a Methodist clergyman in the 1950s. There is a wonderful statement … Continue reading →

Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty. Bloomsbury, New York 2005. F; 9/10. I was tricked into buying this book by the marketers at Chapters who put it on the “awards” shelf because it won one of the major fiction prizes … Continue reading →

Lanier, Jaron. You are Not a Gadget Knopf New York 2010. N; December 2010. Fascinating. This is the inventor of virtual reality who takes the soft view on the ontology of the “Brights”, on their website. Computer scientist and engineer, … Continue reading →

Friedman, David. Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us — and How to Know When Not to Trust Them. Little, Brown New York 2010. N; December 2010. This guy contacted me by e-mail having run across sunshiners.ca. Obviously we agree about … Continue reading →

Bourdain, Anthony. Medium Raw. HarperCollins New York 2010. N; December 2010. Second book by this self-confessedly third-rate chef turned writer. He got famous from his first one, Kitchen Confidential, and in this one he doesn’t bother much with order, but … Continue reading →

Tarnopolsky, Damian. Goya’s Dog. Penguin New York 2009. F; December 2010. I came very close to stopping this book in the middle, which I almost never do. The protagonist is annoyingly self-defeating, doesn’t pay rent, stays in bed all day, … Continue reading →

Collected Fictions. Jorge Luis Borges. Andrew Hurly translation Penguin Classics, New York, 1998, . Original publication in 1935-1983. This is another book I remember from my undergrad literature years. A quite strange European Literature in Translation teacher was preoccupied with … Continue reading →