Author: admin

James: Book Review

I’m not averse to using existing works as the jumping off point for something new, or a tale being told from a new perspective. And I’d certainly expect a book set in the world of Huckleberry Finn, with a slave as a narrator to have heavily racial themes. And I’m a big fan of great writing and good storytelling. Percival Everett’s “James” certainly has all of this going on. But it’s also up other things. Things I don’t enjoy. Or even respect. First, it’s an inconsistent mishmash of parody, satire, pastiche, melodrama, racialist political screed, and self-indulgent intellectual hogwash. It simply can’t make up its mind what it wants to be, so it ends up like a scrap collection that’s pretending to be a quilt. But the Pulitzer committee obviously disagreed.

Meh.

January 2026 Starts with what’s left behind…

I went to an estate sale in a nearby neighborhood.

There are two ways to look at them. It’s either sad to see a house once happily occupied empty and disheveled, and a deceased person’s things greedily pawed through, or it’s comforting to see a home that was obviously well-loved for a long time, and the things they once used ready to be useful or cherished by another.

I choose the second option.