Notes From Sickleburg

Category: book diary

  • What I’ve been reading

    A few months ago I rewatched Starship Troopers, which was great as a satire but not great as science fiction. I was in the mood to read some of the good stuff. Good thing I have a bunch of books sitting around (on shelves, in front of shelves, behind doors, etc) for this exact situation!…

  • Character Introduction

    I mentioned being stuck on this chapter, well, I thought it might be useful to figure out why. Thinking for just a few minutes I came up with one possible reason, which is that this chapter introduces a character who I need to develop more fully over the course of this draft. So maybe I…

  • In case I am crushed under a pile of books…

    There’s the Golden Age mystery newly translated from Japanese, the book about Edgar Allan Poe and the “cosmic flaneur” that I thought might be related to the novel I’m revising (and isn’t, really, but is interesting), the extremely weird novel about a tiny person, the nonfiction book about how different people experience a walk around…

  • Book diary: Beware of Pity

    I read an old copy of this, which was very pleasant. The book itself is wild; Wes Anderson took some of the structure and plot for Grand Budapest Hotel, but not the really twisted part. Current mores make the narrator of the story (not the frame narrator but the one in the story he tells)…

  • Book diary: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

    I’ve had a vague project over the past few years to read all of the best Philip K. Dick books. I have just a few left. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was technically a reread, though it must have been more than 25 years ago that I read it. I didn’t like it much…

  • Book diary: The Custom of the Country

    Finished Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country this morning. I really got the sense that Wharton knew the settings of this book intimately, each one a slightly bigger gilded prison than the last. That prison is what the title refers to: the rules of polite society that bind Undine Spragg, the main character. She’s…

  • Reading Diary: The Custom of the Country

    I’m about halfway through Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. I’ll have some more to say soon. For now: what good character names! The main character is brilliantly named “Undine Spragg,” but my favorite is the society painter Claud Walsingham Popple, who is exactly like how his name sounds.