As far as I’m concerned, bibliophilia is idol-worship, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with the book memes on the Internet. There’s everything from annotating and commenting on the BBC’s Top 100 books, to listing your 12 favorites in Flickr with appropriate photographs, to the five most frustrating books on Biblical exegesis. [Read more →]
Lorraine Heath’s latest novel Surrender to the Devil is book number three in her Scoundrels of St. James series. If you have not read the first two books, they are worth it. Heath has woven the backstory of five previous orphans (Luke, Jack, Frannie, Jim and Bill) who had banded together to work under a kidsman named Feagan. If you are familiar with Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the names and characterizations of both major and minor characters from the band of five and their acquaintances from the underworld might be familiar, and it plays wonderfully into their backstory. However, unlike Oliver and his friends, it is discovered that one of the boys (Luke) is the lost grandson of the Earl of Claybourne, and the Earl takes in Luke and his band of orphaned friends and their status in the world greatly improves.
I’m six chapters into this book and can’t go on. Supposedly, the plot picks up later, something about the Pygmy terrorist kid trying to win the science fair so he can take down Washington with his explosive project. I don’t care. I won’t read any further. [Read more →]
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian who left his country as a young man before the war tore his country apart. In Chicago, he learned his craft as a writer, in English, and now sees his stories regularly printed in the New Yorker magazine. His fine second volume of short stories, Love and Obstacles, contains eight linked meditations on sex, love, war, writing, and dispossession. [Read more →]
I’ll state from the outset that I greatly admire Chuck Palahniuk for his inventive storytelling, muscular language, and his ability to talk about really nasty stuff in a funny way. So, my reading of his latest novel, PYGMY, is definitely colored by that bias.
I’d say this is a worthy addition to his canon. But like his other work, PYGMY isn’t without its challenges. It’s dark, visceral, and dripping with various bodily fluids. [Read more →]
“Bond,” said the dark, cruelly handsome man in a tuxedo as he lit a cigarette languidly. “James Bond.”
And so film-viewers in 1963 were introduced to the suave yet rugged fictional British secret agent James Bond. Portraying Bond in the film, Dr. No, was a young Scottish actor named Sean Connery.
Dr. No and the subsequent Connery-Bond films in the 1960’s inspired millions of film-viewers to go on and read Ian Fleming’s thrillers. I was one of them.
Writer David Sedaris recently lost a fan. Despite the admiration that Sathnam Sanghera feels towards the famed American writer, there is a philosophical disparity that cannot be resolved among the two once-amiable parties. The cause of such rift, you ask? Simply put: Sanghera feels that any dramatic additions to a true story must be properly acknowledged. But Sedaris, the author of five New York Times bestsellers, feels otherwise: [Read more →]
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is a comedy/serial killer book that explores morality and destiny. Its wild, almost incomprehensible drawings and plots are deranged. They twist back on each other in a terrifying gore-fest that ultimately left me feeling like I just read a piece of history. But it’s also funny and self-satirizing.
I live in a college town and we have our fair share of tattoo parlors. There are 2 shops almost next door to each other on the main drag through town and a tattoo and body piercing place down at the end of a row of bars, near where I turn onto my street. That one has an interesting crew that hangs around outside — both people and animals — and Tattoo Machine made me want to stop in and hang out with these guys a little. It’s full of great stories (and you know a busy, urban tattoo shop has to have a million of them), inside jokes, and even some talk about the art of tattoos. Johnson makes it a wild and entertaining ride. [Read more →]
“Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared in “Definitions of Poetry,” adding that “poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.” [Read more →]
I know, I know. But, a.) I’m on vacation, so I needed something I could write about off the top of my head and briefly, and, b.) while you may have read it, you’d be surprised how many people, particularly young people brought up on the LOTR movies, have not read Tolkien’s masterpiece. [Read more →]
Wed Him Before You Bed Him is book six in Sabrina Jeffries’ School For Heiresses series, and, I thought, the final book in the series. However, after reading the book, there are new characters and hints that there may be two more books, which is exciting because book six definitely lived up to the hype. [Read more →]
The Road is bleak and forbidding and utterly beautiful. You know from early on that no happy ending is possible in this desolate future world. Everything is burned to ash, there is little sunlight, nothing growing, only a few desperate souls left alive. And yet, a father keeps going for the sake of his son, born in the aftermath of whatever catastrophe brought down the world: [Read more →]
Now read this! is taking a brief vacation, because I am! Last week I wrote about my favorite novel of all time. Now it’s your turn. Leave a brief comment about your favorite novel of all time and we’ll see if any of us agree. Until next week!
Monkey See is a charming and satirical examination of the question: “what would happen if monkeys could talk, and they had their own 401(k)s?”
It is also a love story, an etiquette manual for talking apes, parenting help for said primates, and a demented “how-to” guide for the aspiring evil scientist. [Read more →]
It’s a wonderful vision of hell stuffed with good ideas, but Kid Eternity left me unsatisfied.
I wanted to like this book. It’s the re-publication of the three-comic series from the early 1990s. Each comic was divided into two cantos. And it’s written by Grant Morrison, one of my favorite graphic authors, and the concept of a journey through his vision of hell sounded awesome. The basic premise is a tour through hell to resolve a crisis — there is a slight nod to Dante’s Inferno. All signs point to me having a massive uncontrollable nerd-gasm. But I never climaxed. [Read more →]
I thought that nothing could seem more ridiculous than a “religion” made up by a hack science fiction writer, until I read a little bit about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints, or FLDS. Secret ceremonies, special undergarments, temples that only members could enter, heavens available only to men with at least 3 wives (who actually get their own planet to rule)… you couldn’t sell a script like this to the most desperate movie exec. So it has always amazed me that people — women in particular — were willing to stay in such a crazy and demeaning situation. There have been a number of books about the FLDS, but none of them has been as clear in its explanations as Lost Boy by Brent W. Jeffs. [Read more →]
Olga Gardner Galvin provides safe harbor for humorists, cynics, and misanthropes at ENC Press, a small, independent publishing house specializing in satirical novels, and July 4, 2009 marks ENC Press’s sixth anniversary. ENC is an acronym for Emperor’s New Clothes, and so it makes sense Galvin’s focus is on novels that reveal the bizarre truths underlying our outer representations. Her catalogue’s comic plots cover much of the socio-political terrain of our times and concern everything from big media and business in big cities to expatriate decadence, sex-change clinics, and trailer-park love. Monkey See is her latest title, and Dear Mr. Unabomber and The Eternity Brigade are due to be published later this year. Galvin’s authors include When Falls the Coliseum’s own Michael Antman, Mark A. Rayner, and Scott Stein. One reason Galvin’s authors love ENC Press is that she has managed to keep each of her 18 titles in print since hanging her shingle online in 2003. To view her complete list and a couple classics available as free downloads, visit ENC Press.
But first, note Olga Gardner Galvin’s conscientious answers to my interview questions below. [Read more →]
My list of the top five novels of all time changes from time to time. Currently it is:
1. Anna Karenina, 2. Lolita, 3. Sabbath’s Theatre, 4. Cousin Bette, 5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.
Numbers two through five will likely change or change in order, but Tolstoy’s novel of adultery in 19th century Russia has been at the top since I first read it twenty-five years ago. [Read more →]
So, I had originally planned to review This Duchess of Mine, the next to last book in Eloisa James’ current series, but I didn’t really like it. The characters were boring, and since most of my posts have leaned toward the negative, I thought I would write a positive review about a book that I did like, but is not as current as the novel by James. However, The Virgin’s Secret came out at the end of April 2009, so it is fairly current. Also, it is Alexander’s first book in a new series. [Read more →]
