Nick's Café Canadien

This week’s selection: On Beauty (2005) by Zadie Smith.

In brief: Smith’s comedy of intellectual warfare in a New England college town dazzles with its ventriloquial feats of dialogue. Yet the novel is more insightful as a study of personal aesthetics, and how artistic principles motivate individual actions, than of American politics, which here seem oddly transplanted from a British sensibility.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on On Beauty, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (1976) by Northrop Frye.

In brief: This collection of a dozen variegated essays—some broadly accessible, others strictly for the interest of literary scholars—is a grab bag of erudite criticism that serves as thorough sampling of Frye’s one-man theory show. The academic pieces, which attempt to deduce overarching mythic cosmologies from the poetic output of writers such as Milton and Blake, are an ample demonstration of Frye’s method. Far more compelling, however, are the pieces that argue for the continued relevance of the imagination following its dislodgment from the objective world of science and history.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Spiritus Mundi, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Cat’s Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut.

In brief: Vonnegut’s apocalyptic Cold War satire is an easily digestible exercise in absurdist humour, though the whole is scarcely greater than the sum of its parts. The novel, while consistently amusing, stops short of delivering on its thematic promise to examine science and religion at the end of the world in moral, humanistic terms.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Cat’s Cradle, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Simple Art of Murder (1950) by Raymond Chandler.

In brief: Strangely enough, Chandler’s vision of the hard-boiled private eye comes off more lucidly in his literary criticism than in the detective stories for which he is known. His reluctance to make his puzzles too neat sometimes renders his mysteries without any puzzle at all, leaving it up to his morally conflicted characters to carry the day. Often they do, but not always.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Simple Art of Murder, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Watership Down (1972) by Richard Adams.

In brief: An impressive adventure story from head to tail, Adams’ bunny-rabbit odyssey truly shines as a demonstration of how myth-making and nation-building go hand in hand—or in this case, paw in paw. The history, legends, and language of rabbit society show off a depth of imagination that stops just short of overwhelming the tale on the surface. Here is a novel unashamed of its bid to be a classic, and has the mettle to pull it off.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Watership Down, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Childhood’s End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke.

In brief: Clarke’s compact story of a benevolent alien takeover of the Earth asks hard questions about whether the human species would ever lay down its natural curiosity for the promise of utopia. Its brisk pace and multigenerational scope make it difficult to get a sustained picture of any of the human characters, and the absence of causal explanation for the rapid transformation of human society into a stock Golden Age directs our attention toward the consequences and away from the how-and-why, but none of this obstructs the philosophical ambition of the piece. I, for one, welcome our new species-civilizing Overlords.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Childhood’s End, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Twilight (2005) by Stephenie Meyer.

In brief: There is a difference between supernatural and superficial. Stephenie Meyer disagrees.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Twilight, keep reading below.)

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