Garry Walton > Recent Status Updates

A marvelous and engrossing successor to the epistolary novel, this time using post-it notes and lovely illustrations cannibalizing a library book in a small town West Virginia high school library. Bits of profanity add to the realism of the exchange but discourage me from sharing it with my precocious elementary school granddaughter.

This, not Shakespeare tomes, seems Greenblatt's favorite subject. He confesses urging Shakespeare in Love's creator to ditch the Bard in favor of Marlowe; here he shows why: heresy, skullduggery, transgressive behavior, violent rhetoric, a violent death. Little is clearly fiction, though too much relies on the subjunctive: might have, must have, could have, perhaps, possible - hypothetical speculations.

Lovely, elegant style a la Henry James
But vapid characters who do not know themselves at all though the author knows them inside and out
I wonder if anything will happen to them, after an intriguing set-up
I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's quip about The Importance of Being Earnest as "a trivial comedy for serious people" - this seems nearly the opposite, a serious comedy about trivial people.

This novel somehow reminds me of Donna Tartt's Goldfinch: a wandering picaresque tale centered around a famous painting and two people inextricably attached to it. The heroes are totally queer - misfits, castoffs, orphans, rejects. The tone is ferociously opposed to adults and adulting, while amazing at recreating the overwhelming passions of early adolescence: love and friendship, shame and guilt, and fear and loss.

Heart-rending. Horrifying. Unforgettable.

I saw this one at the Lincoln Center in NYC in 2012, the week before its official opening. It starred Christian Borle, who was on tv in "Smash" at the time and later won the Tony for his portrayal of Black Stache. Then a stellar cast at the American Shxp Center brought it to life on the Blackfriars stage in fall 2017 - a perfect show for that musically gifted, audience-interactive, community-building theater company.

Just a little bit into this one but already wanting to recommend it as summer reading for women's college students, or as a model for the first UG women admitted to UVa to tell their own story from the 1970s.

Amazing, modernist black and white illustrations clearly influenced by abstract 20th century art;

painful, personal story that meanders into multiple generations of family history, on the way to telling of entire family's life being consumed by his brother's epilepsy

Magda Eklund reminds me a bit of other main characters I've met through the years - Toole's Ignatius Reilly, Proulx's Quoyle, and Honeymann's Eleanor Oliphant -- relatively unattractive but still sympathetic. This is an anti-Odyssey: a aged female protagonist, far from heroic, undertaking a endless exhausting journey not toward but away from home and family and memories.

Though disappointed in her previous mega-hit, The Plot, and its sister, Kuang's Yellowface, I'll try again with the latest from Korelitz.

I read her medieval tale The Western Wind twice; I can't wait to start her newest, a space odyssey.

Amy Heckerling is a genius! Emma's always been my favorite Austen novel because it was my first. When Clueless appeared I found it as clever and shallow as Cher, the Emma character. But upon rereading, I realize how accurately Heckerling caught Austen's tone and Emma's character - far less appealing than Elizabeth Bennett or Elinor Dashwood, or even Marianne. Young, pretty, rich, spoiled . . . like Cher, clueless.

Amazing classical story of captured Athenians in a Syracusan slave quarry mounting a performance of Euripides. Unforgettable characters. An almost unimaginable accomplishment - crafting a page-turner from a mythical dramatic production.

perhaps inspiration for Kerouac and Tom Wolfe
seems to echo or parallel Joyce and cummings

Much to admire in this book, but less to love. Tremendous research evident into an important, rare story. But details of genealogical sleuthing - into property records, estate sale inventories, census records, of enslaved people who bore similar first names and often no recorded surnames - are tedious, confusing, not always clearly presented. Sometimes the style waxes florid, or lapses into repetitive speculation.

Gripping story, but so painful to confront all the economic and gender inequity.

I was right: so far he's lived in Ireland and Oxford and India and Italy, been at the Battle of Waterloo, and communed with Mary and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont.

Begins like Tom Jones but may veer into Forest Gump territory.

This one started with disappointing slowness but became much more interesting not because of plot but cast. Hanks can't make the process of film-making exciting, and his stars are not the best part of the story. But he excels here at introducing in loving detail a host of the "little people" who make the movie magic happen.

Can't believe I'm tiring of this one, since Dream is my favorite play. I think I'm just ODing on Moore's style, which works better lightening a tragedy like Lear or Othello than mucking with a comedy.

Had to wait two months for this one from the library and already 2/3 through it. Powerful true story transformed into spellbinding fiction, featuring a young stagehand, two slaves, and Patrick Henry's widowed daughter, each of whom tells a version of surviving the massive Richmond theater conflagration of 1811.