Tobias Carroll I spent most of the past week reading Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. In its chronicling of flawed people interacting and sometimes failing to connect, its portrait of desperation, and its unflinching realism, I’d file it not far from works I recently read from Messrs. Fante and Kerouac. This trilogy encompasses the ecstatic and the harrowing. At times, Hamilton’s narrator does tend to summarize all that we’ve just encountered (a tendency I didn’t entirely love), but ultimately, his […]

Tobias Carroll In keeping with the previous two editions of Indexing, it should surprise no one to learn that I’ve been reading…even more George R.R. Martin.  Just short of 2,000 pages of this week’s reading consisted of his A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons; more neatly-plotted, morally ambiguous, large-scale storytelling, with just a hint 0f pulp throughout. I found the series addictive, and I’ve officially joined the group of readers eagerly awaiting the sixth book in the series.

Tobias Carroll One theme of the past week’s reading: Russia. I made my way through Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy while spending last weekend in Pittsburgh. It’s a surreal book (more specifically, it’s a surreal group of books), centered around a shadowy organization whose members believe themselves to be the fleshbound incarnations of immortal light-based entities. They spend much of the book attempting to “awaken” other dormant entities by, well, smashing other people in the chest with hammers made of ice; […]

“The Vasa Museum is a giant room dedicated to a war ship, a symbol of a country’s might and colonialism, that ended up at the bottom of the ocean. When the Vasa was setting out on her mission of failure, the Pilgrims had just created the most delicious holiday of all: Thanksgiving.” Elisabeth Donnelly visits Stockholm’s Vasa Museum. Norman Brannon talks about Oasis’s What’s the Story (Morning Glory), and tells the story of how he came to join Owen for a […]

Tobias Carroll Via the WORD’s subscription program, I wound up reading David Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court earlier this week.  Subtitled “A Novel of John Wilkes Booth,” it isn’t a novel that I would have checked out otherwise, but I’m very glad that I did. (It covers some similar territory to James L. Swanson’s nonfiction Manhunt, which I read a few years ago.) The canvas here is wide, and the focus — such as it is — is centered […]

Tobias Carroll One highlight of this week’s reading came from two wildly different novels, each charged by an ambiguous relationship with their narrators. Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (recommended by multiple smart folks with fine taste) has a memorable antihero in Rosa, who recounts the story of her family in the waning years of the Soviet Union. There are massive amounts of self-justification on display, all (mostly) tapping into a particularly bleak strain of comedy. Charles Willeford’s […]

Tobias Carroll After seeing author China Miéville in conversation with Lev Grossman last week, I was eager to read his new novel Embassytown. I’ve been reading Miéville since around 2003, and as several trusted sources had told me that this was his best work, my anticipation grew. I finished reading it last night; I’m still assembling my thoughts on it, but as of now, my admiration for it is high. In many ways, it’s closest in town to his excellent The City […]