Book Reviews

  • Oracle Night, Paul Auster

    How does narrative impact real life? How does real life impact narrative? What is time, and how does fiction exist within it – or outside it? Paul Auster’s eleventh novel is a soup of fictional plots – at one point we are reading the summary of a novel that the character of a novel that Paul’s first person narrator is writing is reading. Read that sentence ten times, and it still won’t make sense, and it’s not just my bad grammar. Despite the fact that an absentminded reader may need flashcards or diagrams to track what is the "host" story and what is a "sub" story (not least of which…

  • Nascar Kind of Life

    My life is speeding by faster than a drag racing redneck.  Once again I find myself in the weekend, a particularly relaxing weekend at home, and look with alarm at the past blur of a week.  I am thinking with discomfort about how quickly I am approaching my next birthday.  Is life really going to go this fast from now on?   The next 5 weekends in a row we’ll be out of town.  A sister’s college graduation, a camping trip, a trip to visit friends at the beach, a wedding, another wedding/camping trip combined (some friends are getting married at a dairy farm, and then having a camping trip hoedown…

  • Bookworm

    I think I’m going to start writing some book reviews.  Ask my husband, and he’ll tell you, I read about 2 books a week.  Sometimes I think it’s not healthy.  But I can’t not have a book going – the book of the moment is Oracle Night by Paul Auster (I read Timbuktu and have been hooked on him ever since).  So I’m going to try to think of a way to structure this site – or another, though I think 2 blogs should be enough (see the other blog to which I contribute!  Exclamation point!!!).  I don’t know how people put those little pictures of books or movies or…