Author Archives: Scott
Go Dutch
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Random House, 2010) In his previous books, David Mitchell established his astounding virtuosity as a storyteller, weaving together numerous genres and storylines into the fabric of a single book. This … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Historical Fiction
Things Seen
Things Seen by Annie Ernaux takes the form of a journal kept by a Paris-area woman during the mid-to-late 1990s. The journal entries forthrightly document the intersection of the narrator’s everyday activities and the larger world of the Bosnian war, poverty, the death of Princess Diana, talk radio, and broadcast … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Nonfiction
Steampunk
I got a kick out of Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection when I read it last fall, but months went by before I realized it belongs to a niche category of fiction called steampunk. In Berry’s book, Charles Unwin is reluctantly promoted to … Continue reading
Filed under Book Lists, Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy
Stars Engulfed in Mist
Maybe the Northwest cloud cover has blocked your view of them, but these books from the first half of 2010 have received starred reviews from multiple sources. And the sources are some of the brightest luminaries in the book reviewing … Continue reading
Filed under Book Lists, Fiction, General Fiction, Mystery & Crime
The Seemingness of War
The subject of narrative truthfulness has come up frequently in my recent reading, and last week I was surprised to find it again as a central theme in Tim O’Brien’s novel about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried. The traumatic … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under Book Discussions & Events, Fiction, General Fiction
Plot is Dead? Fiction and Reality Hunger
Manifestos are meant to provoke, and David Shields doesn’t disappoint. I wrote about Reality Hunger in an earlier post that focused on his views of reality-bending “non-fiction” and the collage-inspired appropriation of work by other writers. I have to say, I’m not … Continue reading
Filed under Book Lists, Fiction, General Fiction
‘Hunger’ vs. ‘Gadget’: manifesto a manifesto
David Shields created quite a stir in recent months with his new book Reality Hunger: a manifesto. One major emphasis of his wide-ranging book is the practice of fact-bending in an age of fabricated memoirs, reality television, and personal myth-making via … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Nonfiction
A Tribute to Elliott Bay Book Company
Book lovers in the greater Puget Sound region are fortunate that the Elliott Bay Book Company is not closing, but is only moving from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill. Store closings are a fate all too common these days for … Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction, Northwest History
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