Dan Savage’s Skipping Toward Gomorrah has the honor of being the first book I’ve read here. (It came with the house.) Has anyone introduced Mr. Savage to Michael Moore? I’d love to see what kind of collaboration the two of them would cook up. . . Other books read in the last month in moments when the boxes and the packing tape got overwhelming: Into The Forest, a personal favorite and a reread. The country has collapsed for unexplained reasons, and two sisters must find a way to survive in a world suddenly without electricity, gasoline, telephones, or grocery stores. …
Category: media
Finished War Against the Animals yesterday on the plane. A bit purple in places, but perhaps that was appropriate for its cast of gay men living in the small New York town of Stone Hollow. The author’s heavy reliance on adjectives sometimes popped me out of the story, something I kept having a difficult time getting into since the author seemed to expect that the reader would already have some knowledge of what it is to be young and gay and to hate and fear it. But the book made the time on the plane pass, and that’s really all …
Just finished reading Francine Prose’s After. Shocking and disturbing. If the author has based even just little of it on Truth, I have a whole pile of new reasons to mistrust and despise the public-school system. And to fear that there is some conspiracy out there attempting to takeover. When did I become so into conspiracy theories? I use to roll my eyes at people who thought the government was out to get them or that the military had covered up aliens in Roswell. And, so far, I still don’t think there are spacemen in the deep freeze in Nevada. …
When I left Borders six months ago, I acquired a whole stack of advance reader editions of various books. “Uncorrected Proofs – Not For Sale.” Some of them have been a delightful surprises, gems I probably wouldn’t have found on my own. Some have been more of a let down. The True Story of Hansel and Gretel wasn’t exactly fun, but then Holocaust literature rarely is. And now that I think about it, the slow pace probably suited winter in Poland. The disappointment has been Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged. The characters are between 14 and 16 years old, but the …
Finished reading Sabriel the other day, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it. It’s definitely not what I expected. Not that unexpected is bad, but the story defies easy summaries. Every time I try to line up the words to say, “It’s about. . . ” it seems too many words have gone on vacation, leaving me unable to adequately explain anything. It’s a good story; the pacing is a bit stately, an interesting choice for something so caught up in Life and Death. Definitely one of the more interesting fictional worlds I’ve …
Excessively tired today, despite sleeping for almost nine hours last night. . . Recently finished reading Lost. The author’s previous two books, Wicked and Confessions Of An Ugly Stepsister, are much better, I think. Lost wanders too much, takes far too long to get to the good stuff. I wanted a ghost story, the supernatural kind, and ended up with a story about a woman who’d had an encounter with grief, seasoned it with a mistake, and then remained paralyzed by it. I suppose the point was that she was a ghost in her own life but it didn’t make …