The Elegance of the Hedgehog book review When I was 23, I brought a copy of Ulysses with me to Greece and carried it around for five weeks. I never actually got around to reading it, but carrying it with me made me feel a cut above my fellow backpackers, most of whom were [...]
Portnoy's Complaint book review "So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family's dinner." That line, one of the most memorable in modern literature, appears about halfway through Philip Roth's humorous, sexually explicit monologue, which is prefaced by the following clinical definition: "Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in [...]
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book review In 1967, at the peak of the Summer of Love, Tom Wolfe set out to chronicle the adventures of Ken Kesey and his followers, the Merry Pranksters. All he knew about Kesey at that point was that he was "a highly regarded 31-year-old novelist and in a [...]
A Farewell to Arms book review I always want to slap Hemingway's women. They never seem like fully realized characters. Unlike the men, who, while they may not always be admirable, at least are recognizably human. Hemingway believed that women, along with politics, drink, money and ambition, ruined a writer. So it's not surprising [...]
The Thing About Mother's Day When I was 7, I got kicked out of Brownies. The reason, as I understood it then, was that I had gone to a special Brownie feast out of uniform. The thing is, I had been in a rush, as usual, and had simply gone in my school clothes. [...]
Fall on Your Knees book review A few years ago, in an interview with Herizons magazine, Ann-Marie Macdonald had this to say about sexual abuse: "The act of abuse doesn't take very long. It's often a fleeting moment in one's life, but the ripple effects - the water table is poisoned from then on, [...]
The Great Gatsby book review "Let me tell you about the very rich," Fitzgerald once wrote. "They are different from you and me." He wrote it in a short story, "The Rich Boy", while he was waiting for The Great Gatsby to be published. It's worth quoting in full because it's at the heart of the [...]
Howards End book review I've always had a fondness for books about houses. The Fall of the House of Usher is one of the scariest (and will be reviewed here once I get up the nerve to reread it), but there are others that come to mind: Brideshead Revisited, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, A House for Mr. Biswas. Houses [...]
Madame Bovary book review Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880) came of age during a time of transition between the revolution of 1830 and that of 1848. It was an era of tremendous political and intellectual upheaval, a time when poets and writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Walter Scott denounced the rationalism of the Enlightenment, [...]
Atonement book review Who of us are so perfect that we've never wished we could go back and do something differently? Or simply not do it at all? Atonement, published in 2001 and filmed six years later, is generally believed to be one of Ian McEwan's best novels. It was shortlisted for the Booker [...]
