fails to evoke 1970s new york city; too long; fancy vocab annoys

****fascinating true story of an english journalist who moves to northern mississippi on a whim

**** scientific approach to cooking; many new insights

*** strange short novel about a visit to a reclusive author with an odd houseguest

**** great meditation on identity/race/religion in america; funny take on academia

** odd meditation on free will

*** some descriptions of characters perfectly fit real life people that I know...great description of a mother-daughter relationship

*** weird fun facts about animals mating, written as a dear abby column

**** "no good deed goes unpunished" in this fantastic epic of midlife catastrophe...great book

*** good writing about sex and middle age, if that's your thing

*** strange and interesting

* what's all the fuss about? a little ambience, created with clichés

**** what a find! kafka + lewis carroll + thomas mann...surreal stories that can be difficult

*** a stranger comes to town

** guidebook

** how-to guide

ironically, it's already out of date; no new thoughts, just a fuddy-duddy's rant

* amusing memoir

*** much better than his previous book; interesting insights into gambling; focus on "attention" in our screen and ad-driven wourld

**** read this for the third or fourth time...a strange novel with a huge cast of characters...much ambivalence...quite a lot of historical background

Almost completely unreadable. Very smart dude, former academic, becomes motorcycle mechanic. I was all set to like this book. But he forgot to stop writing like an academic! He tortures syntax, overuses obscure words, drags in Kant and Aristotle; he even includes endnotes for each chapter!

very badly written marxist rant; overstates every point

**** great novel: mysterious, haunting

*** witty novel with joycean passages

** experimental fiction...remined be of donald barthelme

Soumission has two things going on in it. It's another Houllebecq novel about a depressed white male for whom sex is the one true thing in life. It's also a dystopian novel about a near future where all of Europe has been peacefully taken over by Muslims. The two lines intersect at the end when the main character has a chance to get his teaching job back if he converts to Islam. Houellebecq manages to make this all seem plausible. Though he is probably no fan of Islam, he does a good job of showing why it might triumph over European liberal humanism. He even manages to show its appeal, in a scene where a rich and powerful Muslim lays everything out for the main character.