Columns – Page 2 – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

#tobyreads: Getting International (and Interplanetary)

February 13, 2015 No Comments

I’ve been slowly working my way through the works of Russian science fiction novelists Arkady and Boris Strugatsky–following Definitely Maybe and Roadside Picnic, I checked out Hard to Be a God (in part because I’d been reading about a recent film adaptation of it). It’s a deeply strange book, in the best way: though set in a world that resembled medieval Europe, it’s also a work of science fiction. The protagonist hails from a future Earth, and while he’s a participant in this society, he’s […]

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#tobyreads: Voyages, Art, and Visions

January 16, 2015 No Comments

After several months of being told by numerous smart folks that Will Chancellor’s A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall was fantastic–and running into its author at a fair amount of literary happenings around town–I cracked into it. And: ever read something that you’d wished you’d read earlier for any number of reasons? Well, Chancellor’s novel certainly falls into that category. First and foremost, it’s terrific, a story that covers everything from political unrest to a complex father/son dynamic to competitive water […]

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#tobyreads: Diagrams of Lives

January 2, 2015 No Comments

I’d been meaning to read Beth Steidle’s The Static Herd for a while now. It’s a slim book, but a powerful one, juxtaposing scenes from a life with medical terminology ominous in its context and implications, diagrams, and illustrations. There are questions raised here of family, of mortality, and of things that go unnoticed; what it all adds up to, in the end, is a kind of impressionistic portrait of several interwoven lives, nestled alongside a meditation on observation and interpretation.

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#tobyreads: Fragmentary Lives, Transmitted Over the Air

November 21, 2014 No Comments

In our latest week-in-reading column, we look at new novels from Ottessa Moshfegh, Sean Michaels, and Lynn Lurie.

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#tobyreads: Brief Notes on a Rupert Thomson Novel

November 14, 2014 No Comments

I started reading the novels of Rupert Thomson a few years ago, based on the fact that Maud Newton had very good things to say about his work. I wasn’t disappointed–his novels Death of a Murderer, The Book of Revelation, and Divided Kingdom are all atmospheric, morally-charged fictions that continue to haunt me now, years after I first read them.

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#tobyreads: Space Travel is Boring

November 7, 2014 No Comments

So: The Book of Strange New Things. I’d been curious about Michael Faber’s new novel for a while, and cracked into it earlier this week. The setup is simple and almost archetypal: in the near future, a man named Peter is set on a mission to minister to a group of aliens on a distant planet, while his beloved wife Beatrice stays behind on an Earth in which existing economic and environmental tensions are ratcheting up even higher. The terrain over which […]

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#tobyreads: Some Brief Notes on M.R. James

October 24, 2014 No Comments

Over the summer, I made the trip down to Gowanus to visit the Morbid Anatomy Museum. It was something I’d been meaning to do for a while; I’d contributed to their Kickstarter campaign, and thus had a paid-for admission waiting for me as well. It’s a great space, with a particularly fascinating area of focus, and I’m really excited about how it will evolve in the coming years. Also: the cafe and gift shop is pretty excellent, with an excellent array […]

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#tobyreads: Social Change and Meditations on Society

October 10, 2014 No Comments

I’d had a copy of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An Americal Lyric on my to-read shelf for far too long. Given the rave reviews her new book Citizen: An American Lyric has been getting, I thought that it might be wise to give this earlier work of hers a read. And thus: a new entry in the category of “books I should have read months ago, if not years ago.” Which is one of the dangers of reading: the regret […]