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…
Category: Reading
What is being read at the moment.
Turn the Survey Inward
Philip K. Dick’s story “Survey Team” was so prescient for its time that it has completed the cycle and now seems passé. He sees a future where we are stuck…
Thoughts like Fish
Many awesome passages percolate up from the thick tome that is Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Picador Edition). “…[S]trange ideas would come to my head. Ideas that were like dead…
“Once a man started killing his wife…”
Here is another great line from Graham Greene, on page 67 of The Ministry of Fear (Penguin Classics): “…a kind of self-protective instinct would have made Mrs. Wilcox hate him….
Inundated with Similes
Karen Russell makes excessive use of similes throughout her book Swamplandia!, at least in the first half. Some are clever or insightful, such as “We were watching the small TV…
Reading “Cholera”
Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, like Midnight’s Children, was a long, hard slog, especially for one with a glacial reading pace. The text lives in thick…
More Borges
A few lines from Borges’ “The Shape of the Sword,” quoted below, have an eerily similar quality to a recently cited line from Midnight’s Children: “Whatsoever one man does, it…
Me Read Slow…
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of those books that sat unread on my bookshelf for years and years. Admittedly, I read the first few pages several times and then…
The Wisdom of Tobolowsky
Stephen Tobolowsky, in his new book The Dangerous Animals Club, has a great comment on drug use that really deconstructs our fascination with the practice – “[D]rugs create [an] ……
Has Brad Bird read Superfolks?
Most likely, since The Incredibles shares much thematically with this 1977 novel by Robert Mayer. Many of the concepts with Superfolks are familiar, but only because we have been immersed…