I absolutely loved this book, but then I have always been a fan of the man and his architecture. I grew up in Pittsburgh and was always amazed when I moved away and would run into someone who was unaware of FLW or the most famous private residence in the world - Fallingwater, but then Fallingwat...
Highly enjoyable book. This is the 4th book by Boyle that I have read and he just is one writer that I can keep coming back to. Reminds me of some of the similar issues we read about in The Tortilla Curtain, but Boyle just seems to be able to get into all of his characters and point out the flaws...
I bought this novel at the bookstore in the American Airlines wing of LAX. Unlike most of the newsstands you find in major hubs, this place is the real deal, and what I came up with to tide me over on a long flight from CA to TT (my Kindle had died, and it was more than the battery not being cha...
Heel tof en aangrijpend boek. Knap hoe vanuit vier heel erg van elkaar verschillende vrouwen het verhaal wordt verteld. Vooral Miriam is levensecht. Ook door het perspectief van de Japanner Tadashi krijg je een mooi beeld van de tijd, van Wright en zijn opvattingen. Aan de ene kant Wrights gevech...
So he did eventually get to the salacious murder bits, but it wasn't until the very very end. So he did eventually get to the salacious murder bits, but it wasn't until the very very end.
T.C. Boyle is a writer capable of working in any style, time period, perspective, and length. "Wild Child" is a rich collection of short stories, each one surprising and entirely deserving of being expanded upon. I can't recall ever reading another book of short stories that were so varied yet st...
Reading short fiction, when it is GOOD short fiction, is akin to reading a novel in a few pages. The author must use fewer words to quickly: draw the reader into an unfamiliar world, connect them sufficiently with strangers so that what happens to those strangers “matters” to the reader and set...
I think the reason I marked this to-read was because I liked his short story in Harpers about a girl re-hired to train a couple's puppy, this the cloned pup reincarnated from the remains of her original charge. Half way through these short stories I likened them to a catalog of all the reasons I...
When I lived in Arizona in the late 1980s there was an environmental group called Earth First! that was creating a lot of excitement on campus. Edward Abbey was teaching at the University of Arizona and everyone was reading his book called The Monkey Wrench Gang. Earth First! advocated using som...
The Inner Circle by T. C.T. C. Boyle writes social historical fiction often focusing on a charismatic type person (Dr. Kellogg in the Road to Wellville and Dr. Kinsey in The Inner Circle). Boyle also like to detail the collision of lifestyles (California hippies trying to survive an Alaska winter...
The title refers to the habit deaf people have of vocalising – often unconsciously, since they cannot hear themselves doing it – while signing. They are communicating in two ways at once, hence ‘Talk Talk’.The ‘heroine’ of this book, Dana Halter, is deaf. Her identity is stolen by one William ‘Pe...
(Full essay can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)(Just like anyone else who is a lover of great books, I find myself sometimes with a desire to become a "completist" of certain authors; that is, to have read every book that author has ever written. ...
Slackers, drunks, bartenders, drunken bartenders, casual drug users, and a whole host of ne'erdowells populate story after story of Tooth and Claw, a collective, mostly contemporary look at the modern day, average joe.I don't recall the last time I enjoyed reading go-nowhere character sketch stor...
English is not my first language so I first was wondering if reading TC Boyle in original language was not too ambitious of me (even if I read "San Miguel" in English too).Anyway, with East is East, I was engulfed very quickly in the story, as usual with this author, and I enjoyed every line of i...
This past Saturday night I was reading “My Widow”, a story in TC Boyle’s After the Plague, just before bed. My wife was reading across the room and two of my three sons were asleep in the next room (the oldest was blowing shit up on the beach with one of his friends). Wind blew in through the s...
Dies ist mein zweites Buch von T.C. Boyle nach Wassermusik und wieder bin ich völlig begeistert, obwohl World's End deutlich anstrengender zu lesen ist. Neinnein, keine Angst! Es geht nicht um Schachtel- oder Bandwurmsätze, überdurchschnittlich viele Fremdworte (obwohl, wenn ich so überlege... - ...
One of the rules from Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, that indispensible little writing guide, is "Omit needless words." A rule from the humorous list "How to Write Gooder" is "Understatement is always best. And exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement." If all these ...
One of my least favorite T.C. Boyle novels, in which the milquetoast hero cures his ulcer and redeems his manhood by catching his wife having her womb manipulated in broad pastoral daylight by a doctor of movement therapy while a prominent advocate of vegetarianism looks on, masturbating. The nea...
A man I used to have sex with in California recommended this book to me. One sublime post-coital morning I noticed that his bookshelves were well populated with Boyle's books. I told the man that I'd never read any of Boyle's work. "Here," the man said. "Start with this one." At first I thou...