My take in a nutshell? A strong album, but still a bit of a mixed bag. My long(er) review can be found here for Ink 19.

I blogged a review of this novel here.

To describe I Hate New Music as it should be described - in a word, pointless; in another, execrable - could easily be spun as having missed the point. The book is tongue-in-cheek. It’s intended to ruffle feathers. It’s written by a lover of classic rock for other lovers of classic rock; those who would demur aren’t its target readership…

Full review here on Ink19.

I blogged my thoughts on why Crime and Punishment didn’t quite work as a novel.

My review of this ran on All About Jazz alongside Mark Murphy’s Once to Every Heart.

My review of this ran on All About Jazz alongside Marc Johnson’s Shades of Jade.

An almost wholesale return to the sound of Swell’s halcyon days in the mid-’90s. For fans of Swell who, like me, thought the band had slowly lost its way and become adrift on a sea of ProTools excess, South of the Rain and Snow will come as a refreshing return to form.

I found some of the essays to be a bit grasping (please, folks, Buffy is a guilty pleasure, not an academic pursuit) and fueled by a sense of unfocused outrage, but many of them were insightful, enlightening and raised serious challenges to the status quo. Worth reading for Andi Zeisler’s essays alone – she’s a brilliant writer with thoughtful contributions to many ongoing sociopolitical debates.

A good historical overview of second wave feminism—in fact, I feel more familiar with the three “waves” thanks to reading this. But at times Rosen can be a bit too forgiving of the problems that feminists faced within the movement itself (as opposed to the external sociopolitical oppression the movement was seeking to highlight and overturn), perhaps because she felt as though pointing out its flaws would undermine its appeal and achievements.

THE Mighty Walzer has been my first Howard Jacobson novel and won’t be my last. I so thoroughly enjoyed Walzer, in fact, that Jacobson’s more recent Kalooki Nights has already found its way onto my Amazon wishlist, and I hope to start making my way through the Vintage paperback reissues (but could the covers really be any more drab?) of his earlier novels.

In profiles and interviews Jacobson has often been compared to Philip Roth, and not unfairly. Both draw strongly on their religious roots and make the Jewish culture an integral part of their fiction; both use thinly disguised literary alter egos as their narrators; and both have hopelessly complicated relationships with the fairer sex. But Jacobson, while he calls to mind more Portnoy’s Complaint-era Roth rather than Plot Against America-era Roth, is a much funnier and lightheartedly self-deprecating writer than his American counterpart; and in comparing the similarities between their work, it begins to look as if their careers have gone in opposite directions. Jacobson started out with “serious” novels and then found his lively comic voice later, whereas Roth has moved the other way - to the point where he’s treading water in the same well-dredged pool of postwar American existence, particularly if Christopher Hitchens’ and a recent Philadelphia Inquirer review of his new Exit Ghost are anything to go by. I’d even go so far as to say that Jacobson’s observations - about himself, about religion, about most anything, really—tend to be sharper than Roth’s, packed into pithy, meticulously worded sentences that sizzle on the page.

To save myself from dancing far too close to a critical ledge, I’ll stop there. One Jacobson novel compared to half-recalled selections from Roth’s oeuvre isn’t enough to start weighing the two authors against one another with any fairness and accuracy. But for those who delighted in reading Portnoy’s Complaint, The Mighty Walzer ought to be next on your reading list, and with any luck, it’ll prompt you to start delving further into Jacobson’s back catalogue. He’s a writer who’s surely deserving of greater acclaim, even if it is just on the strength of Walzer alone.