Archive for the ‘Novel’ Category

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe [Please note that this review does include spoilers.] I will admit that before I read The Bonfire of the Vanities I only knew two things about it: that it was made into a movie that no one walking this earth seemed to truly enjoy, and that the [...]

The World to Come by Dara Horn In a spiritual context, I would hazard a guess and say that the phrase “the world to come” implies the encroachment towards heaven for most people. To me, it seems to imply a departure of this world and a deliverance to another—which, when looked at in that respect, [...]

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.” — Richard Yates, when asked about the central theme of his novels ********** The best thing about “The American Dream” is that its duality is [...]

Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov Reading Lolita is like listening to the most technically perfect guitarist perform. The technically perfect guitarist will wow you with his precision and render any complexity into a shell of a joke. The guitarist’s fingers will hit all of their marks on the fretboard with frightening and spidery ease; their other [...]

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland [Please note that this review does include spoilers.] Microserfs is one of those types of books that is somewhat difficult to properly categorize, because to do so would cause one to start using contradictions as the basis for its review. Some examples: this book is dated, yet it still reads (and [...]

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen It is fitting that Jonathan Franzen has one of his main characters (Patty Berglund) reading War and Peace, and that he intermittently references Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece here and there throughout Freedom. It is fitting because the way Franzen maps out his characters’ lives in this book, and how they try to [...]

Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold The first forty pages of Carter Beats the Devil has some of the best and genuinely intoxicating writing to read. Within these pages you have the wonderfully flowing introduction of magician Charles Carter (or, Charles The Great, as he’s known at this point) and a summary of [...]

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger [Please note that this review does include spoilers.] The brilliance of The Time Traveler’s Wife is, like all diamonds and other shiny gems, a multi-faceted one. Here you have a book that not only deals with time travel—a potentially murky and confusing and (from the author’s execution) selfishly [...]

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee If I had to choose 5 books that not only represents the canon of American literature—while also defining what America is for someone who only had a remedial knowledge of our country—To Kill A Mockingbird easily cracks that list for me.[1] It might be the perfect American novel, [...]

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro [Please note that this review does include spoilers.] I went into this year with a New Year’s reading resolution: I was going to make it a point to primarily read fiction from the last decade. I started out by reading Susan Gregg Gilmore’s Looking For Salvation At The [...]