The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

Another terrific read by Nabokov, I have yet to be disappointed by his novels. This one follows a chess player, but you don't have to know a single thing about how to play chess in order to enjoy it. It's more about the mental states, and how imagining all the possible outcomes in a game …

how ‘the customer is always right’ culture is ruining our society

Happy May Day! Workers' rights are important, and are ignored quite a bit in this capitalistic country (one of the few countries that doesn't have May Day as a day off for workers... quite ironic.) Here, it seems, even workers treat other workers like crap. And I don't think it's necessarily because they are bad …

The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien

The end saved this one a bit for me. I really was not a fan of a lot of the middle, so much of it seemed disconnected from everything and meaningless and confusing, but maybe that was the point. The end was really surreal and creepy and dark, but the kooky humor of the rest …

I don’t like ‘lol random’

I've been reading The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, and am finding myself generally annoyed with it, and had some curiosity why, since it seems like the kind of humor I used to really enjoy, in 'Hitchhiker's Guide' for example. I think the difference is that in Hitchhiker, things that appear random at first are …

The Plague, by Albert Camus

I finished it, and though parts of it made me think and feel and were interesting, overall I was mostly bored and impatient with it. I enjoyed the close-view narration style of The Stranger a lot more, and maybe if I'd gone into it more expecting a sort of dry historical style account for most …