I have often thought that the best first sentence in a novel is in The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied [...]
I first learned about The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts when I read a review of it in the Washington Post here. Suitably intrigued, I picked it up and read.
The Feminine Mistake darts around like a minnow and continually circles back to a couple of core points. It is a little Momento-ish since each chapter [...]
Recently, the Queen of England came and went (Carter had some interesting comments here in a post titled “Send the Queen Home”).
Isn’t it totally absurd that any modern country has a heredity ruler (figurehead, whatever)?
Jeremy Paxon (author of On Royalty: A Very Polite Inquiry Into Some Strangely Related Families) was on the Daily Show with [...]
It has been almost twenty years since I bought a magnet with this quote on it (attributed to Mark Twain). I think it is useful advice.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the [...]
While I generally enjoyed the book, the problem with Everyman by Philip Roth is that it is a little inaccurately sold. The book is a collection of memories of a single man (supposedly an ordinary man) that starts with his funeral.
The problem is this: the main character isn’t ordinary. His father is a well-off jewelry [...]
I am not sure if Milan Kundera has ever heard the term “Web 2.0”, but in his book (though, he was likely writing it before the term was coined anyway) The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (that I first wrote about here) there is a quote that strikes me as related.
Kundera is referring to [...]
As compelling as it is, this book totally freaked me out. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a “coming of age story” about the “coming of age” of people (clones) who are being raised so that the vital organs can be harvested.
It is complete with teenage angst, romance and girl infighting (not [...]
As I wrote here, Milan Kundera is a genius. His books are nearly perfect. Identity is a quick, but brilliant, read and is filled with many interesting quotes. Ultimately, it is a love story, but it is also a view of external events via the interior world.
Some of the quotes are short, [...]
