The last segment for 2011. For the full list, see 2011 Books Read.

126. The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Centres around Madeleine Hanna, an English major in an on-again-off-again relationship with Leonard Morten (who may or may not be David Foster Wallace), much to the chagrin of Mitchell Grammaticus, who’s in love with fair Madeleine.

It received mixed reviews, but I had fun with it. I like lit crit, deconstructionist thought, and spiritual ambiguity. Continue reading »

Still playing catch-up.

116. Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf

Wonderfully impressionistic, it tells the story of Jacob Flanders, from boyhood to his death in the war.

117. The Boy Who Followed Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

The fourth in the five book series. Not as strong as the previous three, but fun nonetheless.

118. I Can Say Interpellation!, by Stephen Cain

In this work of détournement, Stephen Cain riffs off ten popular children’s rhymes to produce radical and politically charged poems. The repurposed stories deal, often brutally, with racial politics, climate change, drug use, rampant capitalism and consumer culture, among other horrors of the modern world.

For a full review see Broken Pencil, issue 54. Continue reading »

In addition to its usual excellent content,⁽¹⁾ issue 54 of Broken Pencil contains two reviews from me, which I’m super excited about.

The first review is of Afflictions & Departures, by Madeline Sonik. Part memoir, part history, I later learned it was nominated as a finalist for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary ended up claiming the prize, but Sonik was in excellent company.

The second review is of Stephen Cain’s I Can Say Interpellation!, a collection of children’s rhymes rewritten as politically charged poems. Neat stuff.⁽²⁾

It’s a great magazine, check it out!

Footnotes:

1. Especially check out “Zine vs. Art”, by Laura Trethewey, which explores what amounts to the gentrification of the zine scene. [↩]
2. Stephen Cain seemed like it! [↩]