Lands Away: Literary Reviews & Fiction Writing

It's really amazing to me that I never read Kurt Vonnegut before this summer. I knew who he was, of course, but never got around to reading any of his novels. Dark comedies, especially ones with strong anti-war themes, are totally my cup of tea. I grew up on M*A*S*H and one of my favorite books of all time is Catch 22. Vonnegut's two most famous novels, Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five definitely fit that genre. Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical account of a POW's experience in WWII. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, has a lot in common with Vonnegut himself, who also occasionally appears in the novel as a first-person narrator. Billy is captured by the Nazis and is taken to Dresden, where he survives the Allied fire-bombing that decimated the city (just like Vonnegut himself did in real life).  The story-telling in Slaughterhouse-Five is very disjointed, jumping from all over the place in space and time (Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck in tim

As a Foreign Language and Linguistics major, I spent most of my time in college studying the Humanities. And that's great, I enjoy the arts, but I do sometimes wish I could've studied more science. Since graduating I've tried to fill in some of those gaps by reading books on scientific subjects, mostly related to space, physics, and environmental biology. I got my hands on a copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time this summer, and it was a great read. Hawking does his best to help out those of us who were Humanities majors by starting from the basics: he talks about theories of the universe going back as far as the Greeks, Galileo and Newton. It's easy to follow at first, and even as things get more complex, Hawking's explanations are clear and well-phrased. I admit I had to re-read some things a couple times to let the information sink in, but over all it wasn't a difficult read. Given the subject matter, that's quite a feat. Like I

There's no argument: Kafka is one of the greatest writers in modern history. His stories are short but powerful, hitting you hard and compelling you to think about them for weeks afterward. I found them dark, abstract, difficult to understand... but fascinating nevertheless. Famously, Kafka never felt that his writing was worthy of publication and on his deathbed gave all his unpublished stories to a friend to destroy. That friend, Max Brod, couldn't bring himself to actually burn them, however, and instead had them published after Kafka's death. Sadly, Kafka died quite young (he was only 40) from tuberculosis. I read the Penguin Classics collection of his short stories. The four that I found the most interesting and memorable were: Metamorphosis, The Judgement, In the Penal Colony and A Hunger-Artist. So disgusting, and yet, so sad! I can't decide if I'd rather hug it or step on it... The Metamorphosis is probably Kafka's most famous work. Most pe