Tag Archives: book review

Notes on Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy: Royal Assassin

Posted on July 20, 2022 by Lee

What is a life for? This is the question that Fitz is asking again and again, in one form or another, as he tries to find his place in the world and wonders whether it’s all worth it. It’s easy … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Significant Other by Isabel Galleymore

Posted on July 22, 2019 by Lee

Isabel Galleymore’s Significant Other is about the modern human being and her relationship to nature. When the poet is “walking with the ocean below” she is walking with the ocean. She asks the ocean questions, to which “the ocean blinked” … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Lee

Sometimes you encounter a book and you don’t know quite what to make of it. Sometimes you feel this right from the first page, and from there you plough on with a weird and wonderful feeling that things are slowly … Continue reading →

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Review of Slavoj Žižek’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (Part 1: “Introduction”)

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Lee

Slavoj Žižek begins his book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight by discussing the purpose of philosophy. Its purpose, he says, is to “prod” people – meaning to “corrupt the youth” the way Socrates did, by challenging established norms. I … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Lanny by Max Porter

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Lee

A lot of the very best books have a very simple story, made interesting by the new perspective that the author has brought to it. Perhaps it’s a story we have heard a hundred times before, but now it’s full … Continue reading →

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Kierkegaard vs the Modern World

Posted on December 10, 2018 by Lee

(A Review of Sylvia Walsh’s Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality, Character, and Virtue) Søren Kierkagaard is a difficult thinker in more ways than one. Not only is his writing full of abstractions and speculative notions and references to Hegel, but he … Continue reading →

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Creation is Grace: Notes on Daniil Kharms

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Lee

I’ve been reading I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary: the Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms (published 2013) and trying to get a picture in my mind of the kind of person Kharms was. “Creation is … Continue reading →

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The Noose and the Sky

Posted on March 20, 2018 by Lee

The deepest truths about a human being can be expressed only in lies. Nietzsche knew this, Henry Miller knew this. So did Sylvia Plath. Why? Because each human being is the sum of the stories she tells herself: for example … Continue reading →

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The Subject of the Drama is The Lie: Review of David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife

Posted on February 26, 2018 by Lee

All of your thoughts are bizarre and troubling, says David Mamet. So sit down with a coffee and examine your own head and there’s always something to write about. And if you’re asking yourself “Am I mad?” “Will people want … Continue reading →

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From the Reading Diary: Kenneth Patchen’s Selected Poems

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Lee

Kenneth Patchen is interested in, among other things, the way the branches move on the trees to create visions and to scratch the surface of the stars in the night sky. He’s also interested in the cruelty that men – … Continue reading →

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