essays
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Review of The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
A great bedside companion book for weighing down your overburdened nightstand. Good for audiobook as well, for picking up at random places. Amusing musings, profound quotations, and rambling essays on odd and useful topics.Montaigne retired at 38, which in the 16th century was old, and decided he would do little…
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Review of Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
Calvino’s lectures, prepared but not delivered late in his career, are just as thought-provoking as his fiction. He discusses some key, broad aspects of literature, and his personal discoveries of certain propulsive forces in writing. His discussion of Multiplicity I found most interesting, and the way he categorized encyclopedic and…
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Review of Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
Polishing off the remainder of DFW’s works has been a treat this year. I began by listening to the author-read audiobook, then picked up the paperback where the audio left off. What an astounding journalist he was. “Consider the Lobster” is an in-depth look at a lobster festival. “Big Red…
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Review of Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace
Not sure if I’d recommend this one. It’s DFW, and yes, it’s witty, acerbic, articulate, et. al. but the items under discussion did not engage me in the way that Lobster, and Supposedly Fun Thing did in their turn. I’d therefore call this his least successful collection. They padded the…
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Review of My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays by Steven Moore
This is a book of professional book reviews, about 780 tall pages. All about writers from the 20th Century, with maybe a few exceptions for writers from the late 19th and early 21st. As explained in a closing essay, this is the pseudo-third volume of his Alternate History of the…
L. S. Popovich 