Writing about writing and reading
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 …
I discovered this book via an article in the New Yorker, and knew I had to read it. I quickly discovered it was out of print (1000$ for a tattered paperback on Amazon) but I was luckily able to find a PDF online. That was Wednesday night (today is Friday). Needless to say, I couldn't …
Continue reading "The Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt"
In this beautiful and dark novel, we read about a young man's obsession with the famous Golden Temple in Kyoto, Japan. Mizoguchi, who is unpopular and ostracized for his stuttering, is introduced to the temple by his father, and eventually becomes an acolyte there. After seeing the temple every day, he becomes more and more …
Continue reading "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima"
In World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were bombed by the Allies, and many were entirely destroyed, leaving over seven million homeless, and 600,000 dead--twice the number of all American casualties in the war. The subject of this book is to ask, given the sheer scope of this destruction, why did rarely any …
Continue reading "On the Natural History of Destruction, by W.G. Sebald"
A friend linked me this article about the squeamish hesitance of writers to call their books sci-fi, and the reputation sci-fi has for being cheap or base entertainment. Some of this rings true for me, too, even as a (ex?) sci-fi fan and writer myself. Their example of Faber is accurate. I remember when I …
Jonas David 