Me Read Slow…
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of those books that sits unread on bookshelves. Even that first page, with his predilection for long, unbroken paragraphs, discourages a quick dip into…
[A Living 404]
What is being read at the moment.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of those books that sits unread on bookshelves. Even that first page, with his predilection for long, unbroken paragraphs, discourages a quick dip into…
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] ……
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…
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…
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…
Graham Greene could have been talking about today’s political pundits with this line from The Tenth Man: “She was like an old weatherworn emblem of wisdom – something you find…
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…
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…
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…
“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…