Author name: Ed Frey

Missive #219 Published 12 February 2024

Child of God established McCarthy's interest in using extreme isolation, perversity, and violence to represent human experience. McCarthy ignores literary conventions – for example, he does not use quotation marks – and switches between several styles of writing such as matter-of-fact descriptions, almost poetic prose, and colloquial first-person narration (with the speaker remaining unidentified). — Wikipedia
The book is all of that and may not be to everyone's taste.

Missive #217 Published 10 February 2024

This completes the Videssos Cycle of books which I read out of order. They were good reads; although reading them in story line order would probably be best publication order is probably the simplest.

Missive #215 Published 5 February 2024

I have read a lot of Berry's essays and liked them however this collection left me disappointed. That may not prove to be true of all readers since the Customer Review rating were good. It is long on discussing the poetry of other writers which I have little interest in reading plus the language used in the discussion is not one that I understand. He has some other books of his essays that I'll continue to read and hope that he does not focus on poetry.

Missive #211 Published 30 January 2024

The novel that Aldous Huxley himself thought was his most successful at "fusing idea with story," Time Must Have a Stop is part of Huxley's lifelong attempt to explore the dilemmas of twentieth-century man and to create characters who, though ill-equipped to solve the dilemmas, all go stumbling on in their painfully serious comedies (in this novel we have the dead atheist who returns in a seance to reveal what he has learned after death but is stuck with a second-rate medium who garbles his messages).