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Ficciones
Review: A collection of very well written and very unusual short stories. Like any collection or anthology, you take the best and get through the rest. Fortunately most of these are of the former variety. Some of the faux-literary-criticism ones were over my head, or just not my thing. Thought provoking and often very surprising.
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Burmese Days
Review: Outstanding novel of British Colonial Burma. All the protagonists are thoroughly dislikeable. Gin soaked, heat baked, pathetic lives playing out in a dirty, remote hill station in Burma’s jungle. Once again Orwell proves to be the voice of conscience for the 20th century. SImply an amazing piece of writing, yet it is never much
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Step Across This Line
Review: A wonderful collection of essays, columns, reminisces, and letters from a remarkable man. I lived through all the years and events that are described in this volume. Yet I have very little knowledge or experience of them, having chosen to spend all of the time from 1992-2002 sitting on a barstool and missing out
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Anthem
Review: Magnificent. A beautifully crafted dark vision of a dark future. I feel no need to write a manifesto or donate portion of my comic book sales to the Ayn Rand Foundation (true story, there is a dude on eBay that does that. Makes a point of telling you in the item description. I bought
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Klee Wyck
Review: Vivid, spare, imaginative prose. Says in one phrase what some would take three lines to say. Proust would take 10 pages. I had a pretty low opinion of natives before, but I like them even less after reading this. The myth of the noble savage is just that, a myth. Savages need to be
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Pride and Prejudice
Review: Why did I wait so long before reading this? Outstanding narrative, humor, plot was a bit convoluted but I got it sorted quickly. The prose is exquisite. Really. Hard to improve a single line after 200 years. So good. Did not expect that. This book made me want to: read the rest of her
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The Recognition of Shakuntala
Review: Introduction by Rabindranath Tagore. So you know it is good! Goethe loved this, thought it was exquisite poetry. An excellent translation and the rhyming parts, where they occur, are natural sounding and not forced like often happens in translated poetry. A lot of the characters and rituals you would really have to be Hindu
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The Myth of the Sisyphus
Review: A series of essays on existential philosophy. First and longest of them was tedious, but well worth the effort to get through. The last few essays were beautiful vignettes of the life and scenery of Algiers and Iran. A brilliant and honest writer. This book made me want to: visit Algiers in the 1950s
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Fahrenheit 451
Review: Always get asked if I’ve read this, and finally did. Well worth the wait. A novel for our times, and for the times before and the times to come judging by the popularity of reality TV. Very quotable, very readable, very visionary. Just plain great. This book made me want to: read more and
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Into Africa
Review: Couldn’t put this down. Superb history, well researched and backed by primary sources, yet reads like a novel. An impossibly difficult journey, for a grail quest. Reminded me a lot of the Franklin fiasco and the tremendous waste of lives and resources spent to recover one foolish old adventurer. Learned a lot about 19th
In His Own Words