“The Kremlin Ball” narrates time Malaparte spent in Moscow during the late 1920s and the intellectuals and Soviet elite he met there.
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Cultural Consumption, 2022-Style! Best of!
The best books and films of 2022, some description thereof, as well as a few of the worst.
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- 2022-12-31
- Monthly Reading, Viewing Report
Jane Eyre: Post-Colonial Christian Zealotry?
Reading "Jane Eyre" for the second time revealed a quite different— quite Christian and not postcolonial—one from what inhabited my memory (and imagination).
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- 2022-12-26
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal
“The Silence” by Don DeLillo: Electromagnetic Pulses and Voiceless Narration
Don DeLillo’s "The Silence," is a strange novel featuring an electromagnetic pulse and empty narration
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- 2022-01-29
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal
Satire or Misanthropy? “Solar,” by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel “Solar” is a misanthropic retelling of ten years in the life of erstwhile Nobel Prize recipient Michael Beard
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- 2021-05-23
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal
Anna Seghers’ “Transit”: Profound Unknowing
In Anna Seghers’ novel “Transit,” no one really knows who the other is. The reader is never certain of who the narrator really is.
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- 2020-12-15
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal
Reading Slowly: “War and Peace”
Why reading slowly, especially War and Peace, should be practiced with solicitude, so as to fully appreciate the journey reading is.
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- 2020-08-09
- On Literature, Books Faves
Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop”
A novel of religious devotion genuinely spiritual without falling into the mirthless repetition of ecclesiastical doctrine
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- 2020-06-11
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal
Notes on Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard”
Idle reflections on The Leopard, by Giuseppe de Lampedusa, which narrates several events in the life and afterlife of a 19th-century Sicilian noble
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- 2020-04-23
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal
Krasnahorkai’s “The Last Wolf”
A reading journal entry on Lázló Krasnahorkai’s “book” The Last Wolf, which is really two small books.
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- 2020-02-26
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal
Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons”
Why do some works of art age better than others?
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- 2019-12-03
- On Literature, Books Reading Journal