The Daily Sabbatical
Music, Books, and Assorted Maunderings

Graham Greene was never a show off.  He was not the sort of writer that shot off flares with every sentence or attempted to change the way language worked.  He is best known, in fact, as a writer of suspenseful, twisting tales of intrigue with a sprinkling of wry humour and subtle irony.  He was, however, a master, a complete, undeniable master, and for proof look no further than The Power and the Glory. Published in 1940, The Power was the pinnacle of the novels… Read More

It's both exciting and depressing to read an excellent debut novel by some twenty-one year old punk.  It is outright distressing, though, that someone so young should demonstrate such an insider's acquaintance with the seamy world the book depicts. On the cover of my edition, Irvine Welsh compares the book to Less than Zero, and that's apt--perhaps if you splice it with Welsh's own Trainspotting and the controversial movie Kids.  The novel is written from the perspective of a handful of kids in… Read More

I would feel remiss if I went without mentioning the passing of writer David Foster Wallace who ended his own life one week ago today.  When I was an undergrad at Iowa, my friends and I treasured his collection Girl with Curious Hair, and when Infinite Jest came out, we were the first ones lined up at Prairie Lights to claim our copies.  (I recall, actually, taking back my copy because I was unhappy with the glue job on the binding.  I wanted it to be that perfect.)  In recent years, I admit to have fallen off the bandwagon, but a good friend of mine has written a reminiscence for the Observer UK that has brought it all back… Read More

I bought this book on the strength of the dustjacket blurbs.  Thom Jones, Dan Chaon, Julie Orringer, Kevin Brockmeier, Adam Johnson and Peter Orner all write as if this is the debut novel we've all been waiting for.  It also promised to be a genre bender of the sort that has increasingly gained in popularity (in no small part, I think, due to the encouragement of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.)  A young cop with rich brat high-school friends patrols the cemetery garrison of San Francisco and finds… Read More

It's a dicey thing to criticize a Nobel Prize winner, but I find myself even more loath to take a position contrary to that of Harold Bloom.  Nevertheless, here I go:  Portuguese Laureate Jose Saramago's novel Blindness is a flawed work that has its gripping moments and images but that nevertheless falls far short of greatness. Blindness tells the story of a city/country/world whose population is stricken with a contagious form of blindness.  The reader follows the first handful of people who lose… Read More

If you read many book reviews or book blogs, you’ve no doubt been exposed to the hype surrounding Joseph O’Neil’s Booker-listed novel. If it’s not the most positively reviewed book of the year, it has to be close. Sadly, I cannot disagree with the consensus. Netherland may not win the Booker—indeed, my vote still goes to Sebastian Barry—but it will put O’Neil firmly among the list of top young writers.

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Man, this novel must be H-O-T. Thanks to Boing Boing for this one. Read More

John Banville, whose Booker Prize winning novel The Sea had critics speaking of an Irish Nabokov, has started churning out noirish mysteries under the name of Benjamin Black. Christine Falls is his first foray into genre fiction, and its success has been undeniable: it has probably gathered him more readers than all of his more literary books combined. It is far from his best book, however, and I suspect his pen name reminds us that it is not to be judged in the same class. The quality of its language is, to be sure, several orders… Read More

Thanks to the panicky reactions of University of Texas professor Denise Spellberg, outrage about a novel depicting the life of Mohammed's child bride Aisha has led Random House to nix its publication. I'm so pleased to see that Texas can now claim to be home to idiotic religious zealots of more than one stripe.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, Spellberg was asked to read the book for a possible endorsement. But:

But Ms. Spellberg wasn't a fan of Ms. Jones's book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a… Read More