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On this last Sunday in September, The Max and I braved the sunny skies and waded past the homeless conglomeration at the Main Library to join up with Don Herron's Dashiell Hammett tour of the city. Don's website had mentioned the meetup point, along with the requisite $10 per person,...
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Spook Country
by lz in Reading Archive on 27Sep2007
Hollis Henry is constantly recognized as a member of The Curfew, a band that broke up ages ago, but whose fan base has a wide reach. She's trying to reinvent herself as a journalist, most recently with an assignment from nonexistent magazine Node. Her journey takes her from LA to...
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Nothing like hearing about the voyage from the source. Darwin's story of the 5-year trip around the world was first put out in 1839 then revised with some serious scientific ideas in 1845 as he was about to spring the idea of evolution on us. In this book, he describes...
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Tore thru volume 1, 2, and 3 of DMZ this weekend. These are awesome comics, eerily painting a picture of what life in the US could be like if we ever get all "civil war" on each other. Matty Roth is a journalist dropped in the DMZ of Manhattan, surrounded...
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Death in Venice
by lz in Reading Archive on 13Sep2007
Sometimes it's necessary to disconnect from the conveyor belt of current literature and feast on older delights like those Thomas Mann brings to the table. I wish I read German, but I thoroughly enjoyed Heim's translation. Basic idea is that a writer breaks away from his mountain home to seek...
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Men Without Women
by lz in Reading Archive on 12Sep2007
Old H really has the magic; those short, brutal sentences that punch to the heart of the matter, the unspoken words that lurks beneath the dialogue, the powerful staccato of conversation. This collection of stories is unified simply by what the title suggests- Men without women. Several stories have men...
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Ms. Prose (is that a psuedonym?!) begins with a question: is it possible to teach creative writing? She answers herself with a roundabout Yes, and goes on to show us that you learn by reading, by inhaling the structure, details, characters, sentences, paragraphs of the masters. The book itself is...
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Witty, engaging, and the kind of book you pass around the breakfast table to showcase the optical illusion that brought everything into perspective, so to speak. The book is less about happiness than about how the brain works to create pictures and fill in ideas of the future based on...
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I have been a huge proponent of getting rid of "stuff" and simplifying my life, but after yesterday's excursion to the main branch of the library, I may have been too hasty in purging my personal library. In theory, the library works perfectly for me-- I can order books online...
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More than anything, I got a massive reading list from this book. Or a re-reading list, since I tore through a lot of these books 15-20 years ago. I'm excited to dive back into the Western canon. To (Re)Read: Dickens: Pickwick papers, Bleak House, Great Expectations Cervantes: Don Quixote Stendhal:...
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