Posts tagged "literature"
Here’s the thing: you are Jonathan Lethem, bookish writer, raised by bohemian parents in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, as a kid read a lot — books, magazines, the newspaper — graduated high school and went to college. Now, you write a novel called Motherless Brooklyn about a street tough you kind of knew in the Brooklyn neighborhood where you grew up, but didn’t really hang with. Your main character, an oversized orphan with Tourette’s Syndrome who works [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on March 10th, 2007 | 
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Jonathan Lethem literature reviews
The only reason we have any use for Alex Rodriguez (pictured with his steroid bag) is that he messes with Jeter’s head, and the more messing with Jeter’s head, the better off the world will be. Now comes word that Rodriguez, like Madonna and Bette Midler and Jerry Seinfeld and a billion other celebrities, has a new children’s book coming out, called “Out of the Ballpark.”
Oh, the creativity. We picture A-rod burning the midnight oil, hunched over his computer writing [...]
Posted in The City on February 5th, 2007 | No Comments »
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Alex Rodriguez literature sports Yankee hater
Before we picked it up, Atonement fit all our don’t-read-this-suck-ass-thing criteria:
a) it is a Big Important Book
b) it is a bestseller and
c) it came highly recommended by a lot of people.
Think The Kite Runner. And for the first 150 pages or so, we asked ourselves, Why, Recharger, do you read Big Important Books? They all suck. None of these Big Important Writers — Arundhati Roy or Khaled Hosseini or their ilkhood who write semi-historical novels about childhood tragedy — [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on January 21st, 2007 | No Comments »
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Ian McEwan literature reviews
Pick-up on Noon Street, by Raymond Chandler.
Chandler is about style. Fashion, interiors, language–spare, readable, cynical language. The language of people wounded by life, clinging to particles of self-respect. Those are Chandler’s strengths.
Plot is not his strength. After reading all four stories in the collection, I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. I could admire the hell out of the writing, but the writing was so much stronger than plot it ended up distracting me; don’t ask me to tell you [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 28th, 2006 | No Comments »
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literature Raymond Chandler reviews
Dear Mr. Coelho:
Here at Recharger The Dog, we have a rule: never read a bestseller recommended by more than one person.
Ignoring our own advice, we started The Alchemist with trepidation. It began with a cliché that we’ve come to detest—the uneducated working class lad who secretly reads Big Books. This sappy device was used by James Jones in From Here to Eternity (Pruitt, the reluctant boxer or trumpeter—can’t remember which—has a list of Big Books stashed in his pocket), nearly [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 20th, 2006 | 2 Comments »
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literature paolo coelho reviews
Dear Mr. Shorto:
Trademark your name; I will drink any chocolate milk called Shorto.
As for your enlightening, lugubrious history of New Amsterdam—Manhattan–I was disturbed for the following reasons:
It gave me a creepy case of the academics. I did not like slogging through a book. I wanted to feel as if I were in Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back machine; the thrill I got from Jack Finney’s Time And Again (yes, a novel, and the setting was 200 years after yours). I wanted [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 14th, 2006 | No Comments »
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literature reviews Russell Shorto
The God of Small Things
By Arundhati Roy
As the world sinks into pathology, as my kids drift further from me, as I creak towards 53 years—pot-bellied, lonely, strange, starved for affection, grieving lost family life, I ask, Why read novels?
I read The God of all Small Things because, according to a Korean woman who seemed intelligent and who used it to teach her CUNY students, it is a Good Book.
I have developed an allergy to Good Books.
Roy is an annoyingly precious [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media on April 22nd, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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Arundhati Roy literature reviews
Finished Pride and Prejudice for the 2nd time.
Again a chore.
Most of it I wasn’t into. I was barely into the last twenty pages. The problems of two, young people in love—one filthy rich, the other comparatively well-off—misunderstanding each other, seems painfully trivial.
My real problem with the book, however, is two-fold:
First, Darcy, the hero, is an insufferable phony.
Second, I cannot believe that chicks fall for him.
Darcy is a jerk. Three reasons why:
Posted in Books/Films/Media on April 17th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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dating Jane Austen literature love & marriage reviews sex
