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] ……
Category: Reading
What is being read at the moment.
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…
Worst Book Cover Ever?
Is this book cover for Alien Sex, a fantasy sci-fi short-story compilation, the worst ever? Let’s look at the evidence. The background color is pus gray usually reserved for orphan-grade…
In Place of a Soul…
I read the sci-fi book Leviathan Wakes as a bit of a palate cleanse after the intensity of McTeague. Yet in the midst of this potboiler (I am using that…
The Challenge of the Cheese Sandwich
It takes a good writer to make a good paragraph about a cheese sandwich. And George V. Higgins does just that in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (page 167; Picador…
Hammett’s Red Harvest
The plot of Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, plays out, in a microcosm, for larger events in the U.S. What starts the main sequence of events in the book is…
A Legacy of Annihiliation
Palahniuk takes an expansive approach to the culling song in his book Lullaby. For those who have not read the book, it features a bedtime poem, the recitation of which…
Snowmobiles of Doom
“Every generation wants to be the last.” That is one of the many mantras repeated throughout Lullaby (like Palahniuk’s own version of “so it goes”) – and that certainly feels…
Damn that Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk does things that should not work. There is a quality to his writing that is prima facie absurd. It shouldn’t work. Kurt Vonnegut was the same way. It…
The Screwfly and the Y
I recently read “The Screwfly Solution” by James Tiptree Jr., although I think it was published under a different psuedonym, Raccoona Sheldon, all pen names for the actual person Alice…