What I Just Read

I feel tremendous sympathy for this author for the thousands of hours he must have spent poring over the tax code, looking for inconsistencies, fictions, falsehoods and other legal avenues to avoid paying taxes--none of which ever mattered from the practical standpoint of the IRS's real-world enforcement powers. His entire quest, in this book and in his others, is quixotic and pointless. Thus you'd be a fool or insane to follow any of the specific steps or advice in this book. At best, you'll be laughed out of your company's HR office; at worst you'll be thrown in jail. Don't do it.  When you're inside a Kafka novel it doesn't matter how logical you are. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] However, this...

"You can't understand me, we belong to two different generations." This is a novel you can read over a weekend, but think about for years. We try to speak to each other, to communicate with each other, but we can't. It's not that we don't talk: we do, constantly, piling up words at each other. But the words conceal or exaggerate, they distract or cause others to react, or they are simply lies we tell others and ourselves. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] Likewise, the characters in Fathers and Sons  talk, a lot, but they cannot communicate across the chasm of a single generation. Imagine how much better off Bazarov would be if his father could help him see, ahead of time, the journey from arrogant, nihi...

A readable, unusual and ultimately frustrating novel. One gets the feeling that the author didn't really have a game plan for what he wanted to do with the story; instead he wrote by just winging it, making it all up as he went along. Of course the academic world is no stranger to taking a largely plotless, directionless novel and rationalizing it as "modern" and "ahead of its time." [1]  Which... still doesn't change the fact that it remains a largely plotless, directionless novel. With some admitted exceptions, what happens in Dead Souls doesn't matter, the characters don't matter, the specific plot points of the novel don't matter, almost none of it matters. And yes, modern literary analysis will then tell us that that's the whole point, explaining to us patiently that proto-modern novels of this sort are a satire or a send-up of the novel form itself. [2] Note that the reader can still enjoy and appreciate aspects of this work. Like Dic...