Search results

In the morning going to work; in the afternoon during lunch break; at night going back home. Mostly I read in public transportations. When I have a day off I feel too lazy to read.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a good example of how this trend isn't that recent too. It's probably one of the few examples of how it's done with talent, too. I think I know two more: Foe: J.M. Coetzee's take on Robinson Crusoe Lotte In Weimar: Thomas Mann brings Charlotte from Goethe's The...

My favourite genre is quality. I've found it's the one genre you can mix with any other and always get great results. sci-fi and western don't mix, musical and crime don't mix, sci-fi and comedy don't mix... But mix quality with anything and it works.

Paul Bloom argues in Descarte's Baby that children are in fact biologically prone to believe in God. He talks of a test made with children raised by religious parents and children raised by atheists to see whether or not upbringing had any effect on the child's belief, and it was discovered that...

Sounds great! I myself am terrified of science books written before the 20th century since they usually don't have the H.G. Wells' let's-educate-the-masses-by-putting-lots-of-jokes-and-day-to-day-examples spirit that makes reading Steven Pinker, Carl Sagan, Robert Anton Wilson and others so...

Do not read Seeing because you think it has any answers; it doesn't. Read it because it's a really great novel! It's a very loose sequel and the way it picks up Blindness is quite unpredictable. I'm a strict adherent to the beginning-middle-end formula since it's worked for longer than the...

Demian, by Hermann Hesse The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford.

I've only read Shalimar the Clown, and even though I loved the prose and the plot twists and Rushdie's humour, I found his insight into the terrorist's mind really poor: if I got him right, people turn terrorists because their wives sleep with rich Westerners :confused: I don't know, I think...

I’ve been slowly reading Henry James’ novel after an inspiring article by Gore Vidal persuaded me to give the author of the awful The Turn of the Screw another try. I’m glad I did because I’m loving his novels. Henry James has some of the best prose I’ve ever seen in any American writer. The...

If Brown's fans are somehow directed to Foucault's Pendulum, they may enjoy it, which I doubt, but surely they won't go after The Name of the Rose, Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. The comparison between the two authors are superficial, and Eco's highbrow novel doesn't stand...

Not my cup of tea, really. I prefer the modern Portuguese writers: Vergílio Ferreira, José Saramago, Agustina Bessa-Luís, etc. Apart from his short-story on Adam and Eve in Eden I haven't really enjoyed anything by him. The Maias was compulsory reading in school, but I read it without pleasure...

Gore Vidal puts a lot of himself in his book articles, but I don't think I've ever read better reviews than his. He really knows how to dismantle a book and explain why it's good and why it's rubbish. And his sense of humor is second only to Bertrand Russell's.

Today I got Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, Paul Auster's Leviathan and Henry James' The Europeans.

I started and finished: Günter Grass' The Tin Drum: a huge disappointment. José Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon: after 10 novels, Saramago seems so predictable and boring I felt nausea reading this one. Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: best novel of the month, and of the...

Yesterday I got Richard III and the The Scarlet Pimpernel.

I remember enjoying it when I read it many years ago; but I also remember thinking at the time it was hard work: it's a dense, havilly-plotted novel told in a most unusual way (for its time, and for me too when I read it because I was a young reader still), comprising journals, diary logs...

That's an interesting observation. I read people keep coming to him in the street asking whether Portnoy is really based on his life. Haven't people ever heard of imagination :rolleyes: What I also like about this novel is how Roth writes himself in the most self-deprecating way, eventually...

Anti-Semites Anonymous... Phil, please make a novel just out of this crazy idea; I'll buy it, and I'll buy it again for all my friends. I'll do anything you want, but please just give me more of the Ten Tenets of Anti-Semites Anonymous! And if you can, get your Jew friends in Hollywood to make a...

Last disappointing novel I read was Günter Grass' The Tin Drum. To begin with he is not a favourite of mine: up to The Tin Drum I hadn't read anything that had made me see Grass as a literary genius; he writes efficient, but hardly breath-taking sentences; his characters' personalities are...

Baddie, Not to refute the merits of Ibsen, but he isn't really the father of modern theatre. He was important for a short time, at the end of the 19th century, and influenced early 20th century naturalist playwrights like George Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and Bretch. But modern theatre owes...