Coast-to-coast commentary about books
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Never Trust an Ad Campaign
Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon I think this must be the first time I ever bought a book based on an ad – a brief video ad, of all things, on YouTube. I was never a hardcore Pynchon fan. In fact, I wasn’t a fan at all. I couldn’t get through “V” or “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
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Wait for the Play
Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sara Ruhl Ultimately it’s less than satisfying to read a play rather than see it performed, and that was the case with this play. I think I “get” why Ruhl is the queen bee in the theater world these days, but reading this text gives only a shadowy sense of
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Horse Stories
Decider, by Dick Francis Wow, have I read a lot of books by Dick Francis. It’s a guilty pleasure. This isn’t one of his best (“Whip Hand” tops them all, I think) but it’s not bad because it’s set in the racing world from which Francis hails, so it’s at least a decent read. As
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Another Classic Passed By
Orientalism, by Edward Said There are certain books that become cultural touchstones and that you can almost discuss intelligently without ever having read them. “The Communist Manifesto,” for instance. I’m sure that somebody has read this, but I have not. "The Wealth of Nations,“ likewise, and in the same vein of economics. (I have read
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No Kind of Life
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel The Los Angeles Times blurb on the front cover of my edition describes this book as “A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction.” Uh, if you say so… I would have said this is a book to make me believe in watching TV, or
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Damned Faint Praise
Super America, Anne Panning I picked up this story collection without any advance knowledge. Something about the first paragraph appealed to me: My father picked me up from my college after my Acting II midterm. He passed me a smoke. It was spring break, which in Minneapolis meant old glacial dung clung to the curbs
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Without Jeeves, Life Is Not Worth Living
Life With Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse (of course) As I dug further into the horror of “2666,” I began to reread for the umpteenth time this fat collection of Jeeves stories. Ultimately I gave up on the Bolanos and stuck with the Wodehouse. Geniuses of two very different types! Could Bolanos have written the following?
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Another Day, Another Mystery
One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich A sort of a palate-cleanser after the horror show of “2666.” This is a nice, frivolous little mystery told in the style of Robert Parker (on a perky day) and set in Trenton, New Jersey. Nice, fun, and it doesn’t spill over into cloying. Well done.
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Face to Face with Greatness and Horror
Reading ‘2666‘ by Roberto Bolaño This is a work of genius. It’s almost certainly the best novel I’ve read in years… and I think it may well be the best novel of the past decade. But I couldn’t finish it. I had to set it aside about two-thirds of the way through the fourth of
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A cold blooded gang of cigarette-smoking cultists plunge a Nigerian university into mayhem of unprecedented, alarming proportions. They degenerate from cult menace in campus to the deadly act of hostage taking; the heist was a corpse! Desperate, fast and furious, they leave behind them a chilling litter of more dead bodies… – Product description on
Far From Brooklyn 