books

Nabokov wrote all of his novels on index cards first. Vera would drive him around for hours. He'd sit in the back seat and write. These little lines would come and go. He knew everything about his characters before he wrote them. I am a hopeless case of a Nabokovian Existentialist
Wannabe Writer/critic. I hate critics, too bad.

I am a critic.

Critic/ Recent Books I like:
Anthropology and A Hundred Other Stories -Dan Rhodes
V. - Thomas Pynchon
Snakes & Earrings- Hitomi Kanehara
Hip: The History- John Leland
Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from The History of a Dangerous Idea- Mark Kurlansky

Critic's quote/say/decide:
"...No doubt Orwell would have been skeptical of the contentions advanced by author Mark Kurlansky in his new primer, "Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea." Compared with the standard histories offered in American public education, these arguments can safely be described as contrarian: "The case can be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence from Britain," Kurlansky writes; "it was not the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the Jews."
"For every Crusade and Revolution and Civil War," he explains further, "there have always been those who argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals." Joining the chorus of dissidents, Kurlansky attempts to shed light on the epic failures of warfare to secure peace, as well as to cultivate a new understanding of "the way in which things actually happen" in history."