Victorian novels are never as easy to get through as you think, for this reader anyway. There’s a ton of names to keep track of without visual aid, and the serial nature of their publication means there’s plenty of dithering subplots and characters that don’t really go anywhere. In the case of Vanity Fair, it Continue reading

Usually I’d use the mountain analogy for a book of this size, but the sprawl and subject matter of Imperial make the reading experience more like a long, water-less trudge across the sunbaked, treeless valley it describes. Unreliable first person testimonies. Staggeringly soporific stretches of obscure county records. Narratorial interjections from Vollmann himself, that basically Continue reading

Like The Wire, for which it was no small source of inspiration, Clockers, Richard Price’s 1995 slab of streetwise-lit begs to be read in many ways. It’s a dense police procedural, a ghetto crime drama, a comment on race relations in the modern American city, and so on. But to me this is really a Continue reading