Milo and the Calf

Category: Books

  • Review: Kang’s The Vegetarian

    The Vegetarian Han Kang Creepy. Super creepy. Disturbing. Interlocking stories revolving around an abused and disturbed women who turn to vegetarianism appears to instigate a series of events which destroy both her and her family. Of course, it isn’t actually her vegetarianism. It’s about the violence directed at her, the mental illness that violence (may?)…

  • Review: Bennett’s Pond

    Pond Claire-Louise Bennett Smarter minds than mine loved this book. A sort of stream of conscious narration of the life of a women in a small (Irish?) village. The book is often funny, and at times beautiful. The writing is excellent, with complex sentences that are perfectly structured, and the observances of the details of…

  • Review: Nelson’s Bluets

    Bluets Maggie Nelson A meditation on blue, sorta, but also a inquiry into love, life and theory. This is clearly a precursor to the Argonauts. There’s a similar style and tone, moving from the conversational to the theoretical and back. It isn’t as polished as the Argonauts, nor as emotionally compelling, but still an interesting,…

  • Review: Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

    Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair Pablo Neruda The collection that made Neruda famous at a young age. A short book comprised of short poems on love in its many forms. Sexual love, emotional love, love love love love love. A young man’s book.*Beautiful in parts but too sentimental for this middle aged…

  • Review: Nelson’s Shiner

    Shiner Maggie Nelson This year, I finally came to grips with something pretty fundamental about my reading interests – I don’t really care about prose. I care about ideas, and characters, and plots. I care about history, personal development, and inspiration. But I do not care about a formal experimentation. I don’t care about clever…

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    Review: Alacron’s Lost City Radio

    Lost City Radio Daniel Alacron She reads the names of missing and disappears people every night on the radio. Across the country, people tune it to hear the name of their loved ones, disappeared during the war years. She has a name of her own, which she does not read. Her husband, a borderline revolutionary…

  • Review: Bolano’s Distant Star

    Distant Star Roberto Bolano Perhaps my favorite Bolano book yet.* A spin off of one of the chapters in Nazi Literature in the America’s this is the story of psychopathic fascist poet and murder. It’s also the story of how we justify Chile under dictatorship, the politics of art, and what literature is. Like all…

  • Review: Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy

    Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis J.D. Vance The book all your Brooklyn bearded buddies and khaki clad D.C. contacts were talking about. Billed as your guide (from a Yale Law grad no less!) to what the hell is happening in the white working class of the rust belt, this…

  • Review: Bolano’s By Night In Chile

    By Night In Chile Roberto Bolano Considered by many to be one of, it not the, greatest work by the Chilean master, By Night In Chile is the reflections of a dying priest, with a literary bent, on the life he lived. The books that captivated him, the generals who, the fellow Chileans lost in…

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    Review: Jornet’s Run of Die

    Run or Die Kilian Jornet This memoir, written while he was still a very young man, is the story of the world’s greatest mountain runner. Jornet is the perfect storm of mountain athlete. Slight of stature, he was born at altitude, to parents who routinely went on epic adventures with him and his sister. As…