jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

This a two-part novella. The first tells of a last days of John Keats in Rome, centered around a fictitious meeting with the Roman dialect poet Belli. The second part, more of an appendix, is a set of Belli’s poems, with the framing device of an introduction by the supposed translator Wilson. It is filled with enormously witty wordplay, deep references to the form and history of the sonnet, and that period in Romantic literature. Most of them went well above my head but I still caught enough to find this an fascinating and enjoyable book. Having read nearly twenty novels by Anthony Burgess, although none in the last fifteen years, this made me hungry for more of them. Maybe re-reading Enderby should be next on my list.

This is the best book I've read on Cleopatra in the last year. Yes, there was one other (Diana Preston's Antony and Cleopatra -- which was also quite good, with more of a focus on Roman history). It was smooth and enjoyable reading from beginning to end, despite or perhaps because it was often egregiously overwritten. The biggest problem is that we have very little contemporaneous evidence about Cleopatra's life and the stories we do have generally date from centuries later, refracted through a prism of a victor's bias. Schiff is undeterred by this, which makes the book as much historical novel as biography. Which is fine -- we can't do much better -- just a bit at odds with the claim that the book cuts through two thousand years of accumulated myths.

The best book I've read so far this year. Andrea Levy tells the story of the last years of Jamaican slavery and the first years of manumission with a piercing humor, sometimes gentle and humane and sometimes appropriately less so.

The story is framed by a successful Jamaican printer who encourages his mother, July, to write down the story of her life, largely because she is distracting him by constantly trying to tell it to him. Mostly she tells the story in the third person but periodically the novel returns to the first person, present tense -- the time she is writing it many years later. It begins with July's conception in the rape of her mother by the overseer. And the continuous narrative ends with an event even more cold hearted and brutal.

In between, it tells the story of July, a sly, witty slave who becomes a house slave and, after manumission, continues on as a house servant.

It is hard for me to capture just how compelling, well written, beautifully imagined, funny, and tragic the book is. So you should read it for yourself.

An excellent graphic novel. Much darker than Kevin Baker's prose novels, about a low-level Russian mob enforcer in Coney Island who was formerly a soldier in Chechnya. Although most of the "action" is in Brooklyn, it constantly drifts back to wars throughout Russian history. His father and grandfather and great grandfather fought in other Russian wars -- and recall wars from still earlier periods. Each of these is a series of betrayals, of women, by women, and all ending up badly for everyone. And the artwork is haunting.

This joint biography of Cleopatra and Antony is a great man's (and woman's) history of their times. It is a fast and entertaining read. Diana Preston is not a specialist in the period and appears to take some care in interpreting the imperfect and unreliable ancient sources, but does not always help herself from reprinting the striking and romantic versions of the story as true. Learning more about Egyptian history and the amazingly brutal incest and murders in the royal family puts an interesting counterpoint on what is normally related as a Roman-centric story.

This set is a beautifully bound collection of six graphic novels by Lynn Ward. All of them were written (or carved to me more precise -- they're wordless woodcuts) between 1929 and 1937. The artwork is stark, beautiful and verges on socialist realism -- except instead of the heroic workers and artists triumphing, they are typically depicted as being crushed by what Ward portrays as soulless capitalism, authoritarian police states, and simply fate. Although I didn't recognize any particular image, collectively they seemed like iconic representations of a certain age and worldview, to some degree dated and off-base, but also an interesting historical document and work of art.

The first novel in the collection, God's Man, is also one of the best. It retells Faust in a relatively simple, easy to follow series of images that works well without words. The last novel, Vertigo, is another one of the best, a considerably more complex story divided into three parts and multiple sub-parts, it is nevertheless relatively straightforward to follow and covers a vast panorama of Depression-era America. Only one novel, Madman's Drum, is a failure because it is largely incomprehensible without words, although even this one has interesting images.

This novella is set in the world of the His Dark Materials trilogy. It tells the story of how Lee Scoresby gets his balloon, comes from Texas to Europe, and joins up with the bear Iorek. It hints of much greater things to come, but itself is a relatively simple story about Scoresby helping a captain escape from the harbor where he has been trapped at the behest of an evil corporation in league with a mercenary politician and an assassin.

Worth reading if you've exhausted everything else, including Lyra's Oxford, which in some ways is better than this book.

A workmanlike biography of a workmanlike figure. This biography focuses on William Herschel and his sister Caroline. Their major accomplishment was the discovery of Uranus, the first new planet to be discovered since around the time of the Babylonians. Although I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Herschel was neither the first to see it and that even after months of detailed observations he thought it was a small, near-by comet -- and only after others decided it was a planet did he go along. In addition to being a keen observer, Herschel was also a top-notch instrument maker and a theoretician.

It's not entirely obvious that it is the fault of the biographer (Michael Lemonick), but somehow the book is not as interesting as one might have hoped. It spends too much time on Herschel's early life as a court musician, which is not really informative about his future scientific pursuits nor is it a topic that is intrinsically interesting enough to justify spending much time reading. Lemonick is good on the science and context, but somehow that too ends up not being overly exciting or revealing.

But none of these are obvious faults or flaws, just not the highest priority book I would recommend reading.

I am hard pressed to think of what you find in later Dickens that you don't find in this, his first complete novel. That is not to say a lot isn't much better (the imagery of London, the complexity of the characters, and the even more sprawling multiple plots come to mind) -- and that some of the worst of this novel (of which the absurd and unnecessary coincidence of Rose Maylie being related to Oliver is just about the worst). But Dickens already had the combination of comic, tragic, melodramatic, moralizing, satirical, and several other ingredients that he successfully mined in different proportions in all his future books. Although none of them top the stark brutality of Oliver Twist, and especially Fagin and Sikes.