jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

This play has the feel of Eugene O'Neill or Edward Albee, only more compact. It unfolds over a single act in the living room as two couples address the fact that one of their son's hit the others' son in the fact with a stick, breaking his two front teeth. It starts out with relatively civilized mutual understanding and apologies but slowly and inevitably degenerates into immature multidimensional fighting, pitting not just the couples against each other but also the husbands against the wives. In the course, it provides a psychologically astute portrait of the couples and their struggles with each other and themselves.

I remember Joy de Menil telling me that the first six chapters of the Aeneid were great but the last six were unreadable and merited skipping. It took me another twenty years to get around to reading it and I largely agree with Joy -- although I found some parts to like in the second half.

The first six books are Odyssey-like and recount Aeneas' travels from the fall of Troy, through a variety of islands, to Carthage. It begins in media res (not sure of the Latin of this) with the gods fighting about the treatment of Aeneas. Within the first pages the narrator rushes to inform us that the book will culminate in the triumph of Rome, a theme it returns to somewhat didactically throughout.

Following the opening book, is a second book with an extraordinary and largely self-contained flashback to the fall of Troy, including Aeneas' bitter recriminations about the decision to bring the wooden horse into the city walls and some moving scenes with the ghost of his wife who got separated from him in the shuffle. The tragedy of Dido and Aeneas is another largely self-contained book in the first half.

The journey's forward momentum begins with Aeneas' trip to the underworld to see his dead father (not quite as dramatic as one might have hoped). This is followed by the second half of the epic, which is an Iliad-like accounting of the Trojans' war with the Latins, a conflict that is even more pointless than the Trojan War because the leaders of both sides both see the same peaceful solution but repeatedly get driven apart by Juno and her minions.

Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, most of the stories and characters in the second half of the Aeneid were completely unfamiliar to me. I don't think I had ever heard of Latinus, Turnus, Amata, Lavinia or Evander -- all characters that loom large in the epic war that Virgil describes. That is in stark contrast to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Paris, Helen, Priam, Hector, Odysseus, Patrcolus, the Ajaxes, Achilles, and the many other familiar characters that populate The Iliad. I think it is largely because of this that the second half is so much less engaging and dramatic (or it could be that all of these figures are less familiar because the second half is less engaging and dramatic).

Regardless, certainly not something anyone should miss reading, even if you wait another twenty years from now.

This is probably better than the average graphic novel for a twelve year old, was perfectly enjoyable for the short time it took to read, but not anything particularly special. About a girl who travels through space/dimensions to a world inhabited by monster-like aliens where she bands up with misfits to rescue her friend and return to her home on Earth... or at least try to.

A relatively short and enjoyable police procedural. Inspector Maigret is working on a six-year old murder when another death takes place. He unravels the hidden secrets of a bourgeois group of friends who all like to relax at the same rustic bar on the Seine outside Paris. FWIW, the Kindle edition is formatted terribly but the actual Penguin version is physically a nice volume -- almost enough to make you want to read more in the series regardless of the content.

Fantastic storytelling, highly recommended. This novel is ostensibly a spin-off of the Sally Lockhart trilogy, although it draws little from that series beyond the general atmosphere and a few characters

I've never read Lee Child before but based on what I've heard thought he would be one of the better thriller writers. Downloaded this book for free on Kindle about a year ago and in retrospect that wasn't cheap enough to justify getting it.

It started out promisingly enough with an action scene that propels the protagonist, Jack Reacher, forward into the thriller plot. Although the book was a thrill a minute (if you count extensive descriptions of firearms, hackneyed descriptions of killing and occasional sex), I was kept going by the feeling that there had to be major surprises in store. It just couldn't be that the people who appeared good (and most of them were really good) and those who appeared bad (and they ranged from very bad to extremely bad) really could be what they appeared. But sadly, they all were. The "plot" was just a question of how Reacher would kill them all the bad ones while rescuing some of the good ones and avoiding being killed himself.

Some of the purported suspense comes from situations you can't possibly imagine how Reacher will escape. Like a 300 pound killer with two guns who has cornered him weaponless. In that case, the killer decides to put down his guns and beat Reacher to death with his bare hands -- which doesn't work out too well. About three more bad guys similarly take their time describing their diabolical plans to Reacher while letting him handle what they think are unloaded guns -- but surprise, surprise, they're loaded. Similar plot devices make this increasingly a chore to read.

One of the characters in The Birth of Love says, "'Men are unlikely to read a book about childbirth. It's unfortunate, but there's not much to be done.'" And by the time I had finished the book I wondered if that sentence shouldn't also apply to women.

This novel contains four interrelated and alternating stories: one set in Vienna in 1865, two set in the present (one about a pregnant woman giving birth and one about the writer of the first story), and finally a story set in 2153, which we learn is about a decedent of the mother in the second story. All of them are about birth in various forms, three about giving birth to a baby and one about the labor that goes into writing a book.

The different threads are reasonably well tied together, each interesting in its own right, but none enough to sustain an entire novel or even novella by itself.

Some of the psychological perspectives, mostly from the mother's perspective but also from the father's, seemed strikingly accurate.

Main complaint is that some of it is a bit hokey or obvious or bludgeoning of the same theme. But that doesn't detract from the good writing and originality.

A very creative premise marred by the same overly didactic vices that characterized the third book of His Dark Materials, only worse in this case.

This is a 33 page "graphic novel" (really more of a short story) that is about a woman who discovers a mobile library filled with all of the books she's read. If she's only read the first few pages, then the rest would be blank. After her first encounter she keeps searching for the bookmobile but only finds it when she is least looking for it every few years. And she keeps reading books so that they'll show up in the bookmobile and receive the approval of the librarian that runs it. She becomes a librarian and aspires to become a librarian for a night bookmobile, something she eventually achieves in a chilling manner.

The story is self-contained, although it promises to be the first installment in a longer work. I'm looking forward to the rest.

A classic detective novel. With all the positives and negatives that go with that. In some ways the first fifty pages -- before the murder -- were a better written, more interesting novel than what followed which relied on the typical devices of a locked room, an English manor house, and a solution that ultimately involved three different people involved in different aspects of the murder -- all unbeknownst to each other -- in a manner that strains credulity, to say the least. That said, I did keep reading with interest to the end and the coda, like the opening, renewed interest in the characters and their relationships.