Book of the Month – Page 3 – Princeton Writes

Book of the Month: The Book of Goose (2022) by Yiyun Li

admin2022-10-12T11:00:17-04:00

Book of the Month: The Book of Goose (2022) by Yiyun Li Critical Evaluation “All fiction is a kind of hoax in that it spins a delusion, inciting genuine feelings with invented characters and situations. The most propulsively entertaining of Li’s novels, “The Book of Goose” is an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories: to apprehend and avenge the truth of our own being, to make people know what it feels like to be us, to memorialize the people we keep alive in the provincial villages of our hearts. But it’s the motives behind [...]

Book of the Month: The Book of Goose (2022) by Yiyun Liadmin2022-10-12T11:00:17-04:00

Book of the Month: The Candy House (2022) by Jennifer Eagan

admin2022-10-12T09:57:27-04:00

Book of the Month: The Candy House (2022) by Jennifer Eagan Critical Evaluation "If The Candy House is less cohesive than “Goon Squad,” it may be because its subject is harder to get one’s arms around. The story doesn’t describe an arc so much as a network diagram; it doesn’t end, it stops. The biggest criticism I can make of The Candy House is that it kicks us out just when it seems to be getting started. But that is also the strongest praise I can give it. Egan knows that she can never offer a complete picture of the global [...]

Book of the Month: The Candy House (2022) by Jennifer Eaganadmin2022-10-12T09:57:27-04:00

Book of the Month: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020)

admin2022-10-04T10:48:06-04:00

Book of the Month: The Midnight Library (2020) by Matt Haig Critical Evaluation "The narrative throughout has a slightly old-fashioned feel, like a bedtime story. It’s an absorbing but comfortable read, imaginative in the details if familiar in its outline. The invention of the library as the machinery through which different lives can be accessed is sure to please readers and has the advantage of being both magical and factual. Every library is a liminal space; the Midnight Library is different in scale, but not kind. A vision of limitless possibility, of new roads taken, of new lives lived, of a [...]

Book of the Month: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020)admin2022-10-04T10:48:06-04:00

Book of the Month: Heartbreak (2022) by Florence Willliams

admin2022-06-28T13:56:45-04:00

Book of the Month: Heartbreak (2022) by Florence Williams Critical Evaluation "Who hasn’t asked themselves the same aching question framed by the Bee Gees in their plaintive 1971 masterpiece, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” Broken hearts seem in vast supply these days, as we engage in individual and collective grieving for so many and so much lost during the cataclysm of the pandemic. "But then there is the very specific subgenus of heartbreak that is untethered to a particular historical moment and has probably existed since the Neanderthals: the sheer, abject misery of being rejected by someone to whom [...]

Book of the Month: Heartbreak (2022) by Florence Willliamsadmin2022-06-28T13:56:45-04:00

Book of the Month: These Precious Days by Ann Patchett(2021)

admin2022-04-28T12:14:27-04:00

Book of the Month: These Precious Days by Ann Patchett(2021) Critical Evaluation "The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own." Witchel, Alex. [...]

Book of the Month: These Precious Days by Ann Patchett(2021)admin2022-04-28T12:14:27-04:00

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (2021)

admin2022-01-10T13:12:26-05:00

Book of the Month: Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (2021) Critical Evaluation "Just over a third of the way into Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, the narrator describes the wood-burning heater in his childhood home as having “more tricks than a carful of monkeys.” One could say the same about Mott’s wonderful new novel itself. Hell of a Book is many things: part send-up of the publishing industry, part road-trip comedy, part metafictional sleight of hand. But at its core, the novel is a harrowing and powerful meditation on racial injustice and its effects on the human psyche." Schwartz, Adam. [...]

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (2021)admin2022-01-10T13:12:26-05:00

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (2019)

admin2022-01-27T12:10:52-05:00

Book of the Month: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (2019) Critical Evaluation "It takes guts to write a fairy tale these days. No P.R. blurb is complete without the descriptors 'searing,' 'probing,' 'challenging' or the like. The use of destabilizing narrative techniques (which often force critics to either include spoilers or to be oblique in order to avoid them) is so prevalent as to seem almost de rigueur. At a moment when everything in the world feels on the verge of falling apart, there seems to be a widespread cultural expectation (in the West, anyway) that serious art — the [...]

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (2019)admin2022-01-27T12:10:52-05:00

Book of the Month: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

admin2021-11-17T11:37:23-05:00

Book of the Month: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977) Critical Evaluation "Toni Morrison’s first two books — “The Bluest Eye” with the purity of its terrors and “Sula” with its dense poetry and the depth of its probing into a small circle of lives — were strong novels. Yet, firm as they both were in achievement and promise, they didn’t fully forecast her new book, “Song of Solomon.” Here the depths of the younger work are still evident, but now they thrust outward, into wider fields, for longer intervals, encompassing many more lives. The result is a long prose [...]

Book of the Month: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)admin2021-11-17T11:37:23-05:00

Book of the Month: Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (2021)

admin2021-11-11T09:44:53-05:00

Book of the Month: Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (2021) "Born and raised in New York, Whitehead, who lives on the Upper West Side, writes and talks about the city with a native’s mix of affection and exasperation, marveling at its endless contradictions — the grotesque wealth and grinding poverty, the ambition and dereliction, the striving and corruption, the loneliness and misanthropy, the glamour and grime. He finished writing “Harlem Shuffle” during the first few months of the pandemic, when much of the city felt abandoned and hollowed out, silent except for the sirens. "'I’m describing a Harlem that’s in decline [...]

Book of the Month: Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (2021)admin2021-11-11T09:44:53-05:00

Book of the Month: Matrix by Lauren Groff (2021)

admin2021-11-02T13:27:08-04:00

Book of the Month: Matrix by Lauren Groff (2021) Critical Review "Perhaps the greatest pleasure of this novel is also its most subtle. Groff is a gifted writer capable of deft pyrotechnics and well up to the challenges she sets herself, including that of rendering feverish apparitions of the Virgin as recorded by a seminal poet of the Western canon. One senses she doesn’t so much struggle to create her vision but is borne aloft on it, which is the page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her. "But it’s the dogged progress of a grand life that sustains this narrative. From [...]

Book of the Month: Matrix by Lauren Groff (2021)admin2021-11-02T13:27:08-04:00

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