I listened to the audiobook, which was probably a mistake. I could not stand the narration, particularly Louisa’s strident voice, which made me cringe for much of the book. How these teenage characters spoke, acted, and thought rang false far too often. The author’s continued use of literary device cheats grew tiresome by the end. I loved the book’s ideas and themes, but not its execution. As was repeated often, this was a really long story. Too long for me.
I have a strange weakness for novels that involve chess. I adored The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (the book was so much better than the Netflix series). It’s the utter brutality of the game, but without the bloodshed, where wits matter, not brawn, or wealth, or greater numbers.
Surely it is championship chess, and not boxing, that is our most dangerous game—at least so far as psychological risk is concerned.
Joyce Carol Oates
This short, tight novella is about chess, yes, but it’s also an examination of the lengths the human mind will stretch and strain without variety or socialization.
Nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.
A good chess story, but an even better story of the psychological dangers of extreme isolation and single-minded focus.
I love a great short story, but I don’t read enough of them. I decided to read one every night alongside my other reading. And what better source than this mammoth treasure of short fiction from the New Yorker Magazine’s first hundred years?
There are some well-known stories here that I had read before, and many from authors I knew well, but not their shorter works. Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” still amazes me for how much story can fit into just a handful of pages. And Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” continues to shock and fascinate me no matter how many times I’ve read it.
Out of the remaining 76 stories, there were a few that missed the mark, but most were very good, and some were fantastic. My favorites:
This is a difficult book to describe without spoiling the entire story. There are two plot lines at work: the narrator, a severely disabled and reclusive scholar writing a history of his literary grandmother, and the life of that grandmother, her husband, and children, eking out a difficult life in 19th-century American West.
Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.
Stegner is a favorite writer of mine, and I trusted him through the first 500 pages that all this story would transcend the descriptions of an untamed West and the travails of unlucky pioneers.
My patience was rewarded by a spectacular ending, though any other writer might have lost me long before I turned that final page.
I’ve now read four of Stegner’s novels, saving this one, his Pulitzer Prize winner, for the last. I thought Crossing to Safety was his best, and Big Rock Candy Mountain absolutely gutted me. Still, I think this one will stick with me for a long time.
Highlights
I am neither dead nor inert. My head still works. Many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity?
Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.
Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
“What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose’?” “I don’t know what it meant for her. I’ve been trying to make out. She said it was too good a phrase for mere dirt. But I know what it means for me.” “What?” “Horizontal. Permanently.”
Some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.
This insightful review by Adam Woods of On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) intrigued me enough to read this puzzling book, the first of a planned seven-volume series. Five books have been published in Balle’s native Danish with just the first two translated into English.
The narrator, Tara Selter, is caught in a time loop, reliving November 28th over and over again. It’s Groundhog’s Day but with an existential slant on the meaning of self, time, mortality, sustainability, and the inevitable progression of love and marriage.
The science fiction involved with being stuck in a time loop takes a back seat to these serious questions, often in a rhythmic, repetitive style. The plot is thin for most of the novel as the narrator explores an existence devoid of change and together yet split apart from the one she loves.
This first book piqued my curiosity enough that I will certainly continue the series with Book II. I hope a few of my lingering questions will be answered in time.
I didn’t like this book at first. I felt claustrophobic, there in the first chapter, squeezed in at the kids’ table surrounded by a large group of strangers at a Manhattan apartment dinner party. These guests were too witty, overly confident, and entirely full of themselves. Who talks like this? And more pressing, who would want to read an entire novel with these assholes?
But I persevered. In fact, it was the Manhattan setting of this book that initially drew me. I lived in New York in the mid-1990s and recently returned to an apartment on the Upper East Side, where much of the story takes place. McInerney’s first book, Bright Lights, Big City, helped to convince me to move to New York when I read it in college. The descriptions of the city, its magic, and absurdity were spellbinding. The city itself becomes a character in the story, which we follow over a year, from the bitter cold of winter through the languor of summer to the bracing beauty of fall.
A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the ‘library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.
What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
An innovative retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. There are some brutal, hopeless sections of this book that gutted me. There is some humor, but mostly this is a dark, dark book. The ending of vengeance and violence doesn’t feel consistent with Jim’s character, but a man can take only so much.
Stegner must be my spirit author. The Big Rock Candy Mountain affected me on a deeply emotional level because of the many similiaries from my own life that that novel explores. This one touched me as well, but for diffrent reasons. The narrator is 69, retired to his dream home in California, and deeply unhappy. He looks back on his life as pointless, a spectator.
The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark.
