Should have seen Drumpf coming
Infinite Jest has many layers of awesomeness, tough in places but always worth the price of admission, which requires true commitment given its 1,000+ pages and 300+ endnotes. Among its…
Category: Reading
What is being read at the moment.
At least he can easily pass his tiny hands…
There are many great passages from Infinite Jest that presage this year’s presidential campaigns – and no better description that could apply to Donald Trump than this insult buried near…
More Greene
So sayeth one of Graham Greene’s priests – “Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct.” (A Burnt-Out Case, pg. 191, Penguin)
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…