The Daily Sabbatical
Music, Books, and Assorted Maunderings

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

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

At some point I learned to repeat to my teachers that Greek tragedy is cathartic. It probably would have been better to have us read something that actually was cathartic, but I seriously doubt Sophocles would have fit the bill for a bunch of fourteen year olds. Sophocles doesn't do it for me today either, and it's the rare piece of literature that does. But every once in a while I become so enthralled with a book that it threatens to become transformative; I emerge from the reading as if baptised. This was my e experience with… Read More

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramaphone has been widely praised on both sides of the Atlantic. The author has been compared to Foer, Vollman, David Foster Wallace, Ondaatje, and no doubt many, many others. Me, I'm dropping it at page 66 as part of my new policy not to chase sunk costs. (See earlier post on that topic.) Those comparisons are absurd. No doubt something of the book triggered something in the minds of some reviewers, but that doesn't establish similarity of any sort and pasting such comparisons on the cover seems tantamount… Read More