i saw karl knausgaard in seattle. he signed my winedark book

this weekend i saw the norwegian author and future nobel prize winner karl ove knausgaard give a talk at the town hall here in seattle. there were perhaps several hundred people in attendance. compare this to the last author i saw give a talk, hanne orstavik (also norwegian, by some coincidence) where there were perhaps …

lovely words

As one who has been reading constantly for most of my life, I don't often encounter new words anymore. Except, that is, when I read something by Cormac McCarthy. I decided I should start keeping track of my favorites when I, today, encountered two new beauties in the same sentence. Here they are: Coomb (also …

The Pastor by Hanne Orstavik

Hello wordpress my old friend, it's time to write blog posts again... By the end of this novel I felt that it was a perfect, pristine picture of a depressed and empty person. And I loved it. My first impression of the book was how appealing the physical design was. It is not your normal …

Trieste, by DaÅ¡a Drndić

I read this book back in May, and I have had to get some distance from it before I could write about it. It was very affecting, upsetting, and disturbing, as one might expect a book with such subject matter to be. The book follows the life story of Haya Tedeschi, whose son was taken …

Blinding, by Mircea Cărtărescu

It will be hard to describe this book in words that do it justice, but I will try. In short, this is the most dazzlingly hallucinatory, horribly beautiful, stunning, weird, surreal, and searingly memorable book I've read in years. It has vaulted it's way easily to land among my top ten, possibly top five favorite …