November 2010
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May 2010
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“You Don’t Love Me Yet was a minor failure; Chronic City is a major one. The boy...”
– William Deresiewicz from his extensive review of Chronic City in The New Republic.
Side note: I reached the half way point of this novel last night and while I’m trying with all my might to like this book. I don’t. Well there are moments in this book that are impressive, they’re...
April 2010
3 posts
“My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my...”
– Chase Insteadman from Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. Page 121
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December 2009
3 posts
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“What this reader loves about Mr. Salinger’s stories is that they honor...”
– Eudora Welty - In her review for Nine Stories in The New York Times April 5, 1953
November 2009
10 posts
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“The first time I read Blood Meridian, I was so appalled that while I was held, I...”
– Harold Bloom on his experience with reading the Blood Meridian.
“A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or Nil. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.”
- Judge Holden, Blood Meridian
October 2009
17 posts
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“That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him, and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered...
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““‘Oh, my God,’ Sammy said in an undertone. ‘Joe, I...”
– Part 3 - Chapter 3, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Old school boxing references make my heart go pitter-pat, Mr. Chabon. Not that I needed anything else to like about this great book. I get the feeling that I will be pining for this one long after I have finished it.
Jon I may need Vonnegut after this read.
September 2009
5 posts
Words of mass confusion, or the dictionary as best...
Casey warned me that Chabon was a wordy bugger, not that I mind much. I’d rather he wrote with himself in mind than dumbing it down for people like little old me. Anyway, my dictionary is being constantly flipped through right now.
A sampling of words that have got me twisted up in the first few chapters:
Omniveillant, Reichsprotektorat, ausbrecher, penury, cathected, tageblatt,...
“Until recently, Josef, then fourteen, had given very little thought to the...”
– Chapter 3, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
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“Never worry what you are escaping from” he said “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.”
-Bernard Kornblum from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Page 37
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