Grim Afterlife
Yeesh, a very grim imagining of what we could encounter in the great unknown, from Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things: “What if it doesn’t get better? What if…
Category: Reading
What is being read at the moment.
Picking “Grapes of Wrath” out of “The Getaway”
I did not realize the soil in Jim Thompson’s “The Getaway” was so rich that it sprouted “The Grapes of Wrath”: Doc knew people; and … he knew this kind…
Graham Greene, Power and the Glory
“Hate was just a failure of imagination.” (The Power and the Glory, Penguin ed. pg. 131) – only slightly more inspiring than the words of Dr. Ben Carson: “It will…
What’s this about political butts?
John Wyndham was correct that we are fucked as a species: the seas will rise, and plants will hunt us for food and sport. But I’ve read this sentence from…
Don Quixote – 341 years into the future
Cervantes had Trump figured out over 300 years before that dofus was born: “[T]he man who never intends to pay isn’t worried about any problems when he strikes his bargain.”…
Should have seen Drumpf coming
Infinite Jest has many layers of awesomeness, tough in places but always worth the price of admission, which requires true commitment given its 1,000+ pages and 300+ endnotes. Among its…
At least he can easily pass his tiny hands…
There are many great passages from Infinite Jest that presage this year’s presidential campaigns – and no better description that could apply to Donald Trump than this insult buried near…
More Greene
So sayeth one of Graham Greene’s priests – “Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct.” (A Burnt-Out Case, pg. 191, Penguin)
Eye Pouches
Graham Greene buried this great description in the middle of a paragraph in A Burnt-Out Case: “The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of…
Co-opting the Alternative
Pynchon may be documenting the end of a specific era in American life in Inherent Vice, but there is a universal resonance in his description in which the mainstream co-opts…