Category: books

Author

Herman Melville

Moby Dick was a great book well deserving of it’s status as a classic but it was not what I was expecting. Melville is heavy on the details—to the point that you learn a lot of, now outdated, stuff about whales, whalers and whaling in general. I expected more of the white whale. Though he looms over the entire book he spends precious little time as it’s focus. Melville’s writing style is somewhat like that of Joyce in Ulysses, the same attempt to capture the local language and color and switching writing formats from standard prose to play writing. Melville, unlike Joyce IMHO, handles it well and it is neither overpowering nor distracting. A great book for detail oriented people.

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Author

James Joyce

Ulysses is, without qualification the worst book I have ever read. James Joyce makes me sick. The book is convoluted tour-de-force of bad writing and attempts to “push the boundaries of a novel,” all of which, individually and in essence, have been used to good effect… by other authors. The worst thing about this whole disaster is that there are sparkles of really amazing writing but they are mostly confined to passages where Stephen Dedalus speaks to some of his fellow teachers. The fact that you know Joyce can write this well makes the rest of the book that much more of a disappointment. I don’t know how Ulysses keeps making it to the top of editors choice lists. They must know something I don’t—and I would consider myself fairly well educated and well read. My advice: don’t waist your time reading Ulysses, unless you are hopelessly in love with Modernist writing.

Thomas Mann, Translated By John E. Woods

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Magic Mountain is hard to read—dense and slow moving, but that is part of the plot, distortion of time. Mann follows Hans Castrop, “one of life’s problem children” during his stay at a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps in the years preceding World War I. The characters who inhabit the sanitarium and the valley around it are just that, complete characters displaying every possible aspect of all the varied cultures of Europe in the early 1900’s. A good book, but it must have lost something in the translation because at times it just did not hold my attention.

Italo Clavino, Translated By William Weaver

On Amazon.com

I just finished If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, it’s absolutely amazing. The whole idea behind it is so unique and so engrossing that it’s hard to describe the book without taking away some of it’s charm to a first time reader. Calvino’s imagination runs rampant in If on a Winter’s Night, every chapter taking the Reader in a different direction and engrossing them in a new story. Just read it.

Author

Fyodor Doestoevsky

Translator

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsk

I have heard a lot of people refer to Brothers K as author:Dostoevsky’s crowning work, and it is a great book, but I liked Crime and Punishment more.

The Brothers Karamazov is a massive book filled with Dostoevsky amazing insight into human nature. Dostoevsky uses the novel to attack everything from Utilitarianism to Christianity and all things “Russian” or at least all things “Russian” he takes issue with. Ivan, Dmitri and Alyosha are some of the most complex characters I’ve ever encountered. The three of them form a kind of id, ego and super ego of Dostoevsky’s Russian any man.

The Brothers Karamazov is a must read in Dostoevsky’s canon, and one of the best books ever written. It helps cement Dostoevsky’s place as one of the best novelist of all time. However the sheer expansiveness of the Brothers K works against it for me and I think Crime and Punishment [confusion.cc] is a better, perhaps the best, novel.