The Penguin

Galileo's Middle Finger Alice Dreger (Penguin) (Note: this review covers some controversial ground, especially in the discussion of transgenderism). From the title, I thought this was another "so you think you know history" book, a glib volume of bawdy historical incidents (like the time Galileo flipped off the Pope, apparently?) What I found instead was at first simply baffling - what the hell did this have to do with the 15th-century astronomer and his erstwhile digit? - But ended up being utterly engrossing. By the end of this book I was amused, outraged, and zealous for truth at all cost...but also unnerved and unmoored by a simple question: how can we believe anything we read - even this book itself? Galileo's Middle Finger is hard to pigeonhole; it seems to lie somewhere between a memoir and an expose, with a bit of personal defense thrown in. Alice Dreger is a bioethicist, author, and part-time activist who specializes in some of the most tendentio...

Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace My Big Book series continues. Having already chewed my way through Gravity's Rainbow,  I figured I'd better start on that other edifice of (post)modern literature, Infinite Jest.  With the experience of the former literary doorstop still heavy in my brain, I was wholly prepared to be disappointed by another hyperintellectual slog through Smugland. So imagine my surprise when Infinite Jest  turned out not only good, but in many ways transcendent. Like many postmodern works, IJ  holds a rather liberal interpretation of "plot" and "narrative"; you'll start out fairly disoriented before things coalesce into a readable form. The story follows three main characters: Hal Incandenza, tennis prodigy at Enfield Tennis Academy and son of brilliant filmmaker Jim Incandenza; Don Gately, former criminal and opioid addict, who now staffs the Ennet House halfway home; and Rémy Marathe, member of the radical Quebecois separatis...

Well, yesterday was April Fool's Day...I did not get fooled. Or maybe I was. Perhaps there was some sort of meta-foolery going on, which I won't see until years later, and suddenly I'll wake up with a strange light in my eyes, the dawn of a new understanding of what They'd done, with profound regret and a sense of loss at the dialectic of my personal history, vis-a-vis the V2 Rocket. As you might have guessed, I just finished up Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow , and my brain is still recovering from the massive effort.  It took me a month to read the damn thing. I've read Russian novels in less time. I actually picked it up more on a personal dare than anything else;  Gravity's Rainbow  is considered  the  Quintessential Postmodern Novel (at least by  Wikipedia ) .  It's one of the "Big Three" of modern literature/college Lit courses, the other two being Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Ulysses by James Joyce. Being a...