Milo and the Calf

Tag: recommended

  • Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late

    How Late It Was How Late James Kelman When I was twenty, I lived in Berkeley California and worked as a tele-fundraiser for a number of large nonprofits. Yes, I was the guy calling to ask you to donate to the Sierra Club. My co-workers were an incredibly eclectic mix of punks, artists, ex-cons, and…

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    Proulx’s The Shipping News

    The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx I read the Shipping News in 1997 when I was twenty-two years old. It is hard to articulate now the effect it had on me. It’s moving, its beautiful, and it’s the first time I self-consciously realized I was reading a literary novel. I’d read other serious novels before,…

  • Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire

    Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire Jason Goodwin Jason Goodwin is perhaps best known as the author of a detective novel series set in Ottoman Istanbul and featuring eunuch detective named Yasim. I’ve read a couple of those books and enjoyed them enough to pick up his much more serious history…

  • Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas

      Nazi Literature of the Americas, Roberto Bolano The first book I read by Bolano and it got me hooked. Ostensibly, a review of literature written by various Latin American fascists, it is, like much of work, occasionally funny, slightly surreal, and in the end disturbing and brilliant. One of these vignettes was expanded into…

  • Poundstone’s Prisoner’s Dilemma

    Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb William Poundstone Part biography of the genius John Von Neumann, part story of the development of game theory, and part history of the relationship between the academy and the defense department in the cold war era, this book (and everything else Poundstone…

  • Ridgeway’s Blood In The Face

    Blood In The Face: Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of New White Culture James Ridgeway Published in 1995 (the year of the Oklahoma City Bombing), Ridgeway’s Blood in the Face was, was the first serious book I read on the rise of post-war neo-Nazi formations like Aryan Nations and Skinhead…

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    Review: Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

    The Fifth Season N.K. Jemisin The first volume in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. The story of a world beset by earth quakes and other natural phenomenon, which can be kept at bay (or instigated) by a group of people with the power to control the forces of the earth. Called Orogenes, these people are…

  • Review: Weil and Bespaloff’s War and the Illiad

    I’m going to start by giving you a little hint: if you’re wandering through a used bookstore and you see a book published by the New York Review of Books, buy it. Don’t worry if it isn’t something you’ve heard of, or is about a subject matter you’re not particularly interested in. It doesn’t matter…

  • Review: Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees

    The People in the Trees Hanya Yanagihara If not the best novel I read this year, among them. Super-duper icky and disturbing, but deeply compelling story of a scientist who travels to a remote pacific island and finds a substance that can allows those who eat it to live forever. Basically (and intentionally), a b-movie plot…

  • Review: Enrique’s Sudden Death

    Sudden Death Alvaro Enrique As I’ve written elsewhere recently, my tolerance for difficult prose is at a bit of a low right now. But, if its coupled with a fascinating look at the politics of renaissance Italy, the life of the mysterious trouble painter Caravaggio, and the clever use of tennis as a narrative device,…