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…
Category: Reading
What is being read at the moment.
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…
“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….
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…
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…
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…
Watchmen & the future of Highway Virus
The Highway Virus series is a bunch of stories about a future world devastated by a virus. About halfway through it, as I was trying to turn my rambling notes…
One Fat Englishman
One Fat Englishman, by Kingsley Amis, was a decent read – but it was one of those works where reading plodded along, drawn more by the thought of finishing the…