Category: Books

Fiona Apple opens the album “Fetch The Box Cutters” with a verse clearly aimed at her fans. She is notorious for taking her time between projects and all that lazying in between has to leave her wondering if anyone is still around to greet her. She confronts this thought right at the start of “I…

For many years, I have considered Milan Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” one of my favorite books. I’ve recommended it to at least a dozen people and given it away multiple times. But I haven’t had my own copy of the book in years and for some reason it isn’t available in any…

Chapter 11 of “Don Quixote” features one of the knight’s most famous speeches, his “harangue” about the “Golden Age.” Whenever anyone speaks of restoring a glorious past, it’s time to sit up and pay attention to the ways you are being manipulated, whether it’s a MAGA-like attempt to retrieve American past glory or Martin Heidegger’s…

I approached Stendhal’s nonfiction book “De L’Amour” through his novel “Le Rouge et Le Noir,” which impressed me for its deep psychological insights. Stendhal had an uncanny ability to balance analysis and drama, as well as satire and psychology. So, to me, “De L’Amour” is a bit like reading a great author’s diary. As I…

I’ve taken a break from “Drive My Car” for a couple weeks and over this time have been reading Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” which is widely considered his masterpiece. I don’t want this project to veer into a discussion about that massive, meandering novel — although I must admit that nothing would be…

I wrote a little bit about Proust earlier this month and decided this week to re-read the one book in his Lost Time series that I remember least — his novel-within-the-novel THE PRISONER. It’s one of the shortest segments in the project and probably the simplest story of them all because there are only a…

Although I ultimately failed in my attempt to capture chapter by chapter Stendhal’s book of essays about love, I do like how this particular juxtaposition turned out — that of Stendhal’s crystallization theory with Erich Fromm’s construction of love as an activity, not an affect. So I’m returning it to my site with some small…

I started reading Ben Lerner’s new novel “The Topeka School” last October during a business trip to Kansas City. I put it down on the first day — not because I didn’t like it, but because it was making me jealous. The book is about many things, but some of the most impressive set pieces…

In the early parts of “Don Quixote,” Cervantes is heavily invested in the idea that Quixote is mad and was driven that way by the books he read about knights errant. Having just completed what he considered to be a successful quest to defend the economic rights of a peasant — which actually led to…

I also considered entitling this “the maiden who annihilated the myth of the femme fatale.” It’s one of the most memorable episodes in “Don Quixote” and I hope I can do it justice. Quixote set it up in his speech about the Golden Age, where he spoke of a time when virtuous maidens could roam…

I’ve read Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” a couple times, in two different translations, and I’m often tempted to take a third pass. It’s easy to get lost in the beauty of his prose, but what draws me back from time to time are his ideas … his thoughts about art, philosophy, and memory…

The first stories I remember loving as a child were episodes of the old Batman TV series. I was basically obsessed. My mother and father knew I had to tune in at the same Bat-time, same Bat-channel or I would be a petulant mess the rest of the day. I can recall throwing an endless…

No nation or empire lasts forever. Herman Broch wrote a great novel early in the last century entiteld “The Sleepwalkers” about the privileged class of Vienna on the brink of the World War One, the empire about to fall and social order disrupted. But they continue to walk through life with the same petty concerns…