I’m a perfect of exemplar of an author whose party days are decidedly not over, but I’m doubtless at the age/stage where I’m bloody contemplating at least paring down my intakes plural. Not that I’m still at it like a Sophomore or anything but I’m hanging in there. I get a great, tingly buzz (you had to have seen this coming!) recommending great books to keen readers. I live in a library—essentially—and friends who visit for a beer or a spliff most often leave with a book I’ve given them. Now you lot are gonna ask me to lend you some scratch! Now you’ve gone and done it, John! Haha.
Lowry is the best stylist in the history of the English Language bar two other classic writers—Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson.
The amount of alcohol consumed in this brutally beautiful novel is staggering to say the least. Its zesty darkness and, er, volcanic poetry is a stone-cold trip. If you don’t remember (or never tasted) mescal or that time you had too many margaritas, Lowry’s masterpiece will do you well.
If you’re over thirty you should have outgrown your infatuation with Papa by now, methinks; but still it’s nice to revisit this lark of a roman a clef.
You’ll either shudder or joy (or both) at the scenes where the roisterers on the bus are shooting wine into each others’ mouths via boda bag. Did I spell boda bag properly? It’s been a long time, mate.
Jake Barnes is a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Jake is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on real people in Hemingway's circle, and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the…
I like to recommend difficult books—everyone needs a challenge once in a while and the nihilist Huysmans kind of throws down a literary gauntlet here in that he’s sort of daring you to go with him to the abysses of the modern soul.
This book is indeed way more psychedelic than any 60’s Beat guy or girl ever penned or dreamed.
Szalay sort of exposes—in the most subtle of ironic ways—how men
delude themselves with respect to their intentions, their character,
their attitudes towards work and women, and all the concomitant notions
of competition contained therein.
He's got, it seems to me, a quite
Hobbesian worldview going—and that, to me, is refreshing! Of course
the writing is for the most part beautiful; but not too beautiful, not
too embellished. A bit plangent. A bit lapidary.
One thing I would say
is, reading him, I am sometimes tempted to cut the last sentence of his
chapters. He often ends with a note, as it were, that strikes me as
bathetic. I wonder if in some way he doesn't trust the reader.
Cutting
the last sentence: that's an old New Yorker magazine trick and I
think—even though this may sound presumptuous—his prose'd benefit from
it.
Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving - in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now.
Tracing an arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, All That Man Is brings these separate lives together to show us men as they are - ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking…
This isn’t a particularly party-hearty (hardly?) novel, seeing as the music nerds satirized (and glorified) are mostly just f’ed up on wax, not honey oil or absinthe or something. It will indeed make you laugh and give others a contact high of hilarity if they’re in the same room with you.
"I've always loved Nick Hornby, and the way he writes characters and the way he thinks. It's funny and heartbreaking all at the same time."—Zoë Kravitz
From the bestselling author of Funny Girl, About a Boy, A Long Way Down and Dickens and Prince, a wise and hilarious novel about love, heartbreak, and rock and roll.
Rob is a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store. His girlfriend, Laura, has just left him for the guy upstairs, and Rob is both miserable and relieved. After all, could he have spent his life with someone who has a…
As
The Weird Sisters return from their first What-Could-Go-Wrong (spoiler
alert – everything) National Tour, bandmates/lovers John and Jenny face
their iffy futures together (or apart) as the brilliant and mysterious
Katie upends the romantic/artistic balance that’s been
precarious-at-best. The unmitigated vanity, the mythopoeic beauty, the
megalomania and heartbreak, the exquisite talent and ludicrous hubris –
it’s all here in Fredrick’s wonderful, tart-sweet, final installment.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
