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#tlt #threelistthursday @dabbe

Need some levity in your life? Check out LEFT by author Paul McGrath, a satirical scifi novel with serious hitchhiker vibes! See my blog for more info. https://www.thebookdelight.com/2025/03/spotlight-on-books-left-by-paul-mcgrath.h...
#scifi #satire #humor #texas

I‘d say 99% of this book is silly foolishness, poking fun at the “bright young things” and the establishment equally, but that last 1%, the final chapter, is pretty grim Chastity‘s fate was unsurprising but still sad, and Adam ends up just as poor and aimlessly as he began. But for 99% of the book it was just the laugh I needed.

#thewholethingithinkissick

Didn't feel quite as sharp as the first volume. Definitely still heavy on the commentary, but it was less about a specific clutch of problems one might first have seen in the late 50s/early 60s and more about bigger questions, some with arguably a more modern origin: Is civilization a good idea? Is it the anthropocentric or capitalistic aspects of the current ideas of civilization which are the problem? Can urban planning and military action 1/?

#coverstories
#tuxedo

@Eggs
@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Twenty pages in and already laughing out loud.

A strange and obscure little book written in the 1920s, about a rural Ohio woman torn between her husband and a lover. As Dawn Powell‘s biographer puts it well, this novel reads as romance fiction but with all the dark and bleak stylization of a Theodore Dreiser story.

This was a hard book to read and an even harder book to enjoy. It‘s satire that borders on tragedy. I laughed at times, but I‘ve never read characters more lonely. Monk has no community, a strained family life, and is uncomfortable with his identity and society‘s expectations of what kind of man his race makes him. In a fit of anger, he changes his narrative only to discover selling out himself and his culture only enhances his loneliness.

I'm probably more interested in this book as an artifact than for its contents, which were, nonetheless, interesting.
I picked up this 1901 edition in Durham, and the beautiful inscription shows that it was held by the St. Cuthbert's Society at the university. I can't quite make out the signature, but it looks like J. D. Hall, perhaps.
It was published jointly in Dublin & London, the little bookbinder's sticker suggesting this one was printed ⬇️