To be sure, I adore Kafka, but mostly in novel form such as The Castle, Amerika and so on. While I can appreciate some of the stories in this volume, including the famous Metamorphosis and dark, comedic, absurd takes such as Description of a Struggle and In the Penal Colony, I admittedly did not connect to much of the volume; many of the stories meander on like H.P. Lovecraft, but pretending to be a dog or a mole. Not bad. Not amazing.

As far as Graham Greene novels go, I‘d say this one ranks somewhere in the middle of his oeuvre. While no Greene novel is complete without some Catholic or faith theme, this one‘s protagonist is seemingly lacking that faith, yet the question of whether it‘s important or whether he ought to at least believe in something is a constant undercurrent. As usual, another novel of colonizers and their intrigues amongst the colonized; an okay read.

This author‘s work is reminiscent of that other western historian, Richard White, and more generally both of these were perhaps forerunners of the Howard Zinn style of historical narrative with a focus on the experience of the people who lived it instead of the deeds of conquering Europeans and later US officials. One of the great tasks of this book is to dispel the mythical western imagery from film and literature that became historical stand-in.

I finally read this after it sat on my shelf for several years. I used to live in Cyprus in the 90s and remember a period of tension, incidents on the Green Line, Turkish fighter planes buzzing my city, car bombs. I was aware at the time of the basic story of how the island came to be partitioned and the grievances of the Greek and Turkish communities, had visited the Green Line in Nicosia, but this was the first time I read about it in depth.

I normally love books about ocean science and I really wanted to delve into this, but the author‘s writing style was rather drab, unsophisticated and read almost like a college sophomore essay. I just couldn‘t stand it after three chapters. And that‘s a shame because I‘m sure there are great ideas and information in this book concerning our planet and hydrodynamics, how ocean forces affected historical events, etc. But I just couldn‘t do it.

This is what I can best describe as a “cute” and funny little intro to philosophical ideas for the uninitiated. Because of the format -little sections expanding on an erudite quip or a snarky zinger- the author sometimes leaves out really important premises or objections to various arguments, but I suppose that was baked into the plan for this book. It‘s a good little book for light reading at the hotel bar like I was doing in Halifax recently.

As a big admirer, it took me too many years to get around to reading this. No Logo is an account of how corporations began selling brands instead of products, ideas, lifestyles and symbols instead of commodities. With that came the focus group and brands marketed to specific demographics like urban youth who integrated Nike swag into gang culture. Into the 90s, public outcries against sweatshops and environmental degradation awoke a resistance.

This was a great follow up read for the last book I reviewed here about “le grand dérangement.” It certainly helped fill in more blanks for me regarding family lore. It turns out that Acadians were shipped not only to other British colonies, but to Britain itself with many migrating to find lost family members in other colonies, migrating to France and then migrating out again as part of some ill-fated colonial endeavor…

As a descendant of the Acadians myself, I waited far too long to learn about this pivotal event in history. When I was small, my Cajun family had always told me about how we as a French offshoot came to be in Louisiana, the expulsion from Canada, “le grand dérangement,” but it was so distant in collective memory, it was a sort of legend and was in a tl;dr format. I hadn‘t thought much about it, but I finally decided I‘d like to know the details.

This is another one of those American classics I wanted to read, but ended up not liking too much. From what I can gather, the protagonist is a lady of high society who fails to marry the right man, doesn‘t take care to maintain appearances of being proper, ends up getting scammed, takes the fall for some other society lady in a scandal, gets kicked out of the clique, destroys her only method of retribution and then overdoses on sleeping drugs.

While academic in some places, this little book was fun and fascinating if like me, you find different cultural conceptions of the world worth attempting to understand. While perhaps not fully understood, the author journeys through the landscape and tales of the Western Apache in Arizona to map local places, their historical Apache names and the historical as well as their social significance -a geography of stories and inherited wisdom.

This novel, about a servant girl who escapes from the Jamestown colony to strike it out on her own in the woods of Virginia was simply okay. The description of the ordeal of survival became repetitive as well as the over-use of the word “piss;” this story‘s lasting impression in my mind lies in phrases such as, “the brown, sick piss.” The story also seems to have some kind of spiritual eco-consciousness message towards the end, I think at least.

I didn‘t hate it. I didn‘t love it. As others have said, this novella is essentially a highly descriptive inner psychological struggle in a civil war battle setting. I can appreciate it for what it is, but it wasn‘t terribly satisfying as drama or thriller or historical fiction. The 19th century penchant for writing dialogue in dialect isn‘t particularly appealing to me either (like Dickens novels and Huck Finn).

I suppose you could say I sometimes read classics just to say I‘ve read them and it definitely was the case this time around. Perhaps if I was 14 years old in 19th century America, this would speak to me, but I‘m afraid at this distance and life stage, it‘s more of a curiosity of history. I don‘t have much to say about it other than it can be a long slog of dialect, racist themes and cartoonish antics. Relating to any characters is impossible.

This is a history of conspiracy theories centered on the United States, from the founding to the war on terror. It is highly disturbing, interesting and amusing, entertaining even, to see the lengths and mental acrobatics humans will go to in order to make sense of their world in a way which plays to their pre-established fears. While it‘s focused on the US, that‘s not to say that US culture produces more conspiracy theories than any other.

Was stream of consciousness the fad of the 1920s? I get that it might have been new and innovative and a tool to convey perspective, but I absolutely loathe it. I didn‘t like To The Lighthouse for that reason and this is worse. The first two chapters are written this way and are very difficult to follow. The third chapter is written in first person and the fourth and final chapter is written in third person. Each follows a different character.

This book is nine years old now and at the time of writing, the insidious nature of social media, ads and the invasion of privacy were scary enough, so I can only imagine what wondrous changes in apps and tactics these same companies and governments are employing now. To be sure, I think we‘re all aware of the adage that if the service is free, the product is you, but this book lays out in horrific detail the evolution of data and you as product.

This is a dark, haunting, existential novel which evokes similar feelings as Kobo Abe‘s The Woman in the Dunes with a bit of 1984 thrown in. The story conjures questions such as: What is a memory? What is it good for? Does existence depend on memory or in other words if no one remembers a thing any longer, does it exist? As things are forgotten and slip out of existence, does it even matter? Or should efforts be made to preserve what can be?

This is a collection of essays that reads essentially as a memoir, wherein Zweig details his life as a writer in Vienna and traveling abroad and his meetings and reflections on other artists and their work whom he had struck up friendships with (many it seems). But the real allure of this book for me was to read a first-hand account of culture, politics and daily life in Belle époque Europe, during WWI, the inter-war period and the start of WW2.

I‘m a history junkie and I‘ve always been acutely interested in the inner machinations of government, the media environment and propaganda, especially since 9/11, I suppose since that happened while I was in college, a rather formative time. Blumenthal is a reporter that provides a meticulous, yet wide scope of the underbelly of government, politics and media that often relegates him to the fringes because he challenges the official narrative.

I‘m not sure how to describe this book. It‘s both fascinating and frustratingly nebulous. The author claims he has access to higher realms of experience through recollections of life before he was born or the “between lives” time although it‘s never made quite clear how. The book is like a serious of aphorisms arranged by topic and then a FAQ section. Much of it is interesting life philosophy; some of it reads like Spinoza or Heidegger. Meh.

Finally, after a failed start on this tome back in 2012, I started over eleven years later and finished it. Jensen, if you don‘t know him, is a prolific writer whose work typically concentrates on the rampant destruction which industrial civilization inflicts on us and the planet. This particular book is a little off beat in that he explores dreams and those who may be working and informing us “from other sides.” Not his best, but decent.

This book was impressive. I‘m originally from AZ where the border has always loomed large, where cries for a wall and undue discrimination toward Mexicans and anybody who vaguely looks Latino is a staple. Grandin does an impeccable job tracing the origins of the current anti-immigration, anti-social rights, neoliberal economic, militarist order expressed currently through Trumpism in the disappearance of the frontier or subsequent frontiers.

I‘m going to be one of those people that appreciates the idea of the story and the theme of the maniacal, self-destructive quest, but wish to never read this again. I understand that Melville felt the need to expand the work by 70% with essays on whaling and whale anatomy and sailing and philosophy and that has its place, but I didn‘t care for it. After 300 pages, I just wanted this long slog to be over. But I was on team Dick, for sure.

I‘ve known about Chuck Tingle for 9 years now and initially, he was good for a bunch of laughs scrolling through his Amazon catalogue and a fun party gag or inappropriate gift, but it seems he‘s ventured into serious horror. I was a bit skeptical at first that this wouldn‘t have some gay dinosaur or inanimate object love carefully hidden within, but no, it was a well constructed horror novel about the fucked-up nature of gay conversion camps.

So it seems I‘ll be one of the few (from what I‘ve seen on Litsy) detractors of this novel. I realize a lot of people love this, but I did not at all. I‘m not sure what I just read. For me, this omniscient stream of consciousness style is difficult to follow. Each moment requires thirty pages of memories and meandering thoughts and impressions from every participant‘s mind. I‘m not clear on what the story is even about other than a painting.

Greene would have referred to this as one of his amusements and not a novel with serious themes or questions to be grappled with, yet he infused this story about a vacuum cleaner salesman fabricating intelligence reports for Britain‘s foreign service with the predictable Catholic and expat spy intrigue. The absurdity lies in London‘s credulity and the counter plot to remove him by the other faction. A comedy surely with a sprinkle of drama.

It‘s hard to characterize this little book. It‘s a sort of collection of fictional and non-fictional vignettes based on the author‘s travels with oddball friends, living in some unnamed country, perhaps in the former Yugoslavia. This gives the book a backdrop of random and absurd events so that Frederiksen can address concepts like nothing, zero, nihilism, optimism and pessimism. If anything, it‘s an interesting experiment as a book.

Benicàssim, Spain-
I thought about going out on the promenade tonight, but then remembered I had this cava I bought from a vineyard in Requena. So this seemed like an opportunity.

“You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us…But if you are interested in life it never lets you down.”

There‘s not much I can say that hasn‘t already been said about a 400 year old novel. But I do recall a friend of mine, also a philosophy major in college like me, saying that he thought everyone should read this book once a decade. And all I can think is maybe he was alluding to the death scene where the mad knight finally realizes that much of his endeavors have been in error, misguided and embarrassing. Perhaps that‘s all of us if we‘re honest.

Did I like this book? I don‘t know. Like others, I found the story to be gratuitously graphic and violent, but tried to put that aside as a feature of the kind of dystopian frontier western setting at play. And I think in the author‘s mind, the horror of all that was necessary in order for the reader to understand the twisted mental machinations and death cult philosophy that the judge espoused. All in all, a dark, grotesque read.

So I bought this book thinking that it was a new collection of essays, but was disappointed to discover it‘s all of A Long Desire and The White Lantern together with only two new essays, Mesa Verde and Messages on a Sandstone Bluff. So I read these last two new (to me) essays about the exploration of the southwest US and will call this “read.” And I think I‘ll give this to someone who enjoys this kind of material since I already own most of it.

Like his other collection of essays, A Long Desire, Connell‘s follow up is another highly entertaining and witty exploration of history, archaeology, exploration, culture and science. While a bit dated (1980), I‘d still consider it a must read for anybody wishing to delve into an easy introduction to a wide sweep of the human experience. Btw, the White Lantern refers to Antarctica as it reflects more light into space than any other Earth feature.

This wasn‘t bad and it certainly had its moments of tension, but it‘s also clearly a debut novel. Certain scenes or plot points seem implausible and sometimes characters are a bit too artificial in order to keep the plot moving. That said, it had some surprises and was a decent exploration into the psychological thriller genre. There are no likable characters except for perhaps Elaine. And then the anticipated dark ending. Not great. Not awful.

This wasn‘t bad and may be an interesting collection of stories à la Black Mirror, but I also wouldn‘t call it amazing. The stories are often of dystopian futures of coerced, brainwashed citizens or police states rife with propaganda or existential panoramas of a single event or life and the questions that multiple perspectives raise. They‘re creative and fun themes to explore to be sure, but they‘re not exactly thrilling or filled with tension.

This is a very academic text, so it can be a slog at times, yet I think for anyone interested in how societies collapse and why the public seems to be willfully ignorant of it while it‘s clearly happening, this is a must read. There are some particularly helpful insights into how complexity, once reached, cannot be easily undone. There are some interesting psychological insights about human group cohesion and specific American cultural traits.

I always enjoy well rounded treatments of a topic such as this one where the author combines personal experience on the research end of it with a narration on the science and the cultural impacts. In this book, you‘ll learn how tides are generated, how climate change affects them, how different ages and cultures interpreted them and what they mean to islanders in Panama, monks in France and mudshrimp and migrating sandpipers in Nova Scotia.

A 1960s actress comes unmoored after she has an abortion. Her origins in the Nevada desert are a stand in for how she feels inside, “nothing,” while she tries to fill it with driving aimlessly, sleeping around or stealing cars, searching for the place her mother died, searching for something. But later she seems to figure out that life is just craps and “nothing” is all one should want. But she keeps playing, unlike a friend. Dark story.

While this was written in 1952 and there is likely great modern scholarship on the matter, this is still a highly accessible and well researched piece on the origins, mindset, motivations and actions of those German soldiers who could not “psychologically demobilize” from the trenches of WWI once they left the front. The various freikorps were arguably the predecessors of the SA and SS, instruments of the nazi terror and war machines.

There are often parallels drawn between the executions of Socrates and later, Jesus, but the author argues these are superficial. Drawing on Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon and others, Waterfield tries to draw out the historical Socrates and the context in which he lived to understand the charges against him. “Socrates was put to death because the Athenians wanted to purge themselves of undesirable trends, not just of an undesirable individual.”

I wish there was a rating between pick and so-so since that‘s how I really feel about this novel. It‘s good, but I also didn‘t feel as though it‘s the “classic” it‘s touted as. It is however, an interesting thought experiment in how an alien race with neutral gender identities except when in “kemmer” (a monthly mating season when they assume either male or female) shapes a society and how a normal human (male) visitor attempts to comprehend it.

This is a brief biography of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, pioneer of the field of public relations, workaholic, ethically dubious, oddly progressive and shameless self promoter. Propaganda and its history has always interested me so Bernays is a figure I can‘t avoid, but I came away from this book with the impression that he was complex, with self-contradictory drives and self-perceptions. His uncle should have psychoanalyzed him.

This was a sort of dark comedy about the ways in which society is upended in unforeseen ways when everyone stops dying. And that‘s not to mean not aging or not being sick, just unable to die in a particular country after the grim reaper or death (with a little d) decides to finally give humans what they‘ve longed for: immortality. Later, death is reinstated, but is frustrated by a man to whom she cannot deliver. Overall, witty and philosophical.

“Which ‘Belle Époque‘ have I exhumed in the preceding pages? That of 1900, which did not yet exist? That of 1930, which was called ‘1900‘? The ones imagined in 1940, in 1950, in 1968, or even the one at the start of the twenty-first century?” Thus Khalifa‘s historiography posits that when we give a period in time a name or chrononym and as each generation re-examines it, we create a new time, the “past-present.” Very academic; interesting read.

This is the first Dickens novel I‘ve read and will probably be the last. Between the prolific use of dialect and characters I could not relate to and a rather nutty story, I just didn‘t enjoy it or connect to this work. I understand it‘s a classic and really, that‘s why I read it, but I‘m not sure Dickens‘ style is for me. Then again, I suppose works of fiction further removed from our own setting are harder to like anyway.

I really enjoyed this graphic novel. It combined history and psychology with personal experience in just the right proportions to explore how loneliness is spreading, how it changes the behavior and perceptions of those that slog through it and what the consequences for culture at large may be. I could directly relate as a former grave shift worker of seven years and then living through lockdown immediately following. The art is moving as well.

I gave it a rating of so-so as I think I enjoyed this one the least out of all the Chinaski novels. Henry is approached by a bizarre French director about writing a screenplay of events taken from Factotum, the formidable years of a drunk writer. Much of the novel is a commentary on the absurd business maneuvering and back-stabbing by film producers and the prima donna egos and odd hang ups of the talent on set. The least dirty book of the series.

The raunchiest of the Henry Chinaski series so far, this novel is like the Ernest Hemingway of candid, low class hook ups. The constant revolving door of women and Henry‘s sexual escapades seem rather like a low budget porn fantasy, but perhaps it‘s my own bias that I just can‘t imagine anyone living this way, but then again, I‘m sure there are those out there who do and perhaps in the 70s this wasn‘t too far fetched. Not a novel for everyone.

I wasn‘t quite as entertained with this one as I was with Ham on Rye, likely due to a lack of tension in the plot. This sequel is a chronicle of Henry‘s restless moving around the country to get away from his girl Jan only to then wander back to her in Los Angeles. One gets the sense he doesn‘t know what he wants or why he does anything as exemplified by all the dead end jobs he lands only to be fired from each within days or weeks. Still funny.

So it turns out there are five novels about Bukowski‘s alter-ego protagonist and I had already read Post Office albeit out of order. So I decided to start from the beginning with this one. It‘s all about Henry‘s childhood and teen years growing up with an antagonistic father and as an outcast lower class kid trying to survive the school yard in a rich, upper class school. It‘s just as raunchy, irreverent, funny and blunt as you‘d expect.