Fiction. If you go strictly by star ratings, I ended up with nine absolute five-star books, and three that hovered right on the edge. The year began with McCarthy, and what a beginning that was. From there, I moved on to Proust, though the entire series yielded just one full five-star read for me. Two […]
Reading 90+ books doesn’t really mean one has a lot of free time. Or rather—more accurately, since nobody has free time anymore—it means having a longer attention span. And that, I think, is the biggest roadblock to old-style reading habits in the modern world. For me, what worked was switching to audio—essentially solving a digital-era
In Fosse’s trilogy, how is what matters. The story does not exist merely to say where it is going. László, Bernard, Murnane — all of them are about how. Hunger is how, Stoner is how. In Dostoevsky and Leo (Tolstoy), how is primary. Their where is also magnificent — especially in works like Anna Karenina
Recently I finished reading Cixin Liu’s Death’s End. In the hardcore science fiction genre, it stands as a peak of human imagination (for imagination itself is intelligence). It’s also the conclusion of the series. The central plot is that an alien civilization tries to conquer Earth. Humanity spends centuries preparing a weapon to face them.