Word: novels
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...usually make a judgment about a book after reading the first chapter; sometimes even the first page. If I don’t find a novel interesting, I generally stop, no matter how distinguished its literary pedigree. I quit reading “Kristin Lavransdatter” (Sigrid Undset’s Nobel-Prize winning historical romance set in 14th century Norway) after the first sentence, “When the earthly goods of Ivar Gjesling the Younger of Sundbu were divided up in the year 1306, his property at Sil was given to his daughter Ragnfrid and her husband...
...generation. Rather than vainly lamenting the trend, it is more pragmatic to analyze it. The most useful critical exercise we can perform is to examine candidly why people stop reading a book rather than focusing on why people start reading books. Usually someone does not stop reading a novel for a sharply-defined ideological reason, but rather because the book failed to engage them. Is it possible sometimes the book is to blame and not the reader? Countless thinkers have offered explanations for this problem, but few actually explore the qualities of the literature itself that might distance books from...
...sometimes easy for the tracks to fall into a lull or feel stagnant. “Girl I Love You” and “Flat of the Blade,” though solid tracks overall, are prime examples of this kind of stasis, failing to offer any novel interpretation of what Massive Attack have been doing for years...
...into a controllable compartment. “Dance with Snakes,” originally published in 1996 and now translated by Lee Paula Springer, is a four-part frenzy, a detailed depiction of the chaotic hell one man and four murderous snakes engender. Superficially a fantastical page-turner, the novel is at its core an uncompromising interrogation of authority, a gruesome satire whose pivot turns on exposing the consequences that result from a manipulated identity...
...potential, but does not realize it fully. While “Senselessness,” published eight years later, was a horrific testimony of genocide, “Dance with Snakes” is an unsettling account of a narrator disillusioned with his own race. The novel gives a glimpse of the incredible emotional devastation that makes “Senselessness” such a disconcerting story of a man losing grip with his humanity, and it hints at Moya’s humor, with its fast-paced murder scheme that evokes the satirical comedy of Voltaire?...