Darren's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 25 Jun 2011 19:40:35 -0700 60 Darren's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)]]> 8935689
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.]]> 467 Iain M. Banks 1857231384 Darren 5 3.86 1987 Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Darren
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2008/09/01
date added: 2011/06/25
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A mesmerizing read, a mix of impossibly lofty SF (gigantic worlds shaped like hula hoops, wars conducted across light years, and a species that's evolved into almost pure-energy are just a few of the highlights) with incredibly detailed, dirty-precise storytelling, as we follow the adventures of Horza, a spy and a soldier who you still can't figure out after almost 500 pages. The final chapter is a study in beautiful inevitability - the relentless feeling of fate, of an ending that you could not have imagined at the beginning of the book, or even towards the end, but which feels incredibly perfect. Epic, episodic, tangential, impeccably structured, violent, weird, fun, highly serious, energizing and depressing and exhilarating.
]]> <![CDATA[Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner]]> 80234 Blade Runner only confirmed what the international cognoscenti has known all along—Blade Runner still rules as the most visually dense, thematically challenging, and influential SF film ever made. Future Noir offers the story of that triumph, providing readers with a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the production of this innovative cult classic. Photos.]]> 441 Paul M. Sammon 0061053147 Darren 5 4.28 1996 Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner
author: Paul M. Sammon
name: Darren
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 1999/01/01
date added: 2009/02/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete]]> 178459 304 William C. Rhoden 0609601202 Darren 3 4.07 2006 Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
author: William C. Rhoden
name: Darren
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2009/01/01
date added: 2009/02/27
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]]> The Devil and Sonny Liston 40673 288 Nick Tosches 0316897469 Darren 5 3.84 2000 The Devil and Sonny Liston
author: Nick Tosches
name: Darren
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2009/02/21
date added: 2009/02/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football]]> 281299 246 David Winner 0747547084 Darren 4 4.05 2000 Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
author: David Winner
name: Darren
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2009/02/15
date added: 2009/02/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #1)]]> 86524
The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered.

We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible� goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be.

We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam� Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . .

Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection� in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines.

We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness� of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.

Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.]]> 882 Robert A. Caro 0679729453 Darren 0 currently-reading 4.39 1982 The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #1)
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Darren
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/01/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> One Hundred Years of Solitude 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Darren 0 currently-reading 4.10 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Darren
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/01/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[FreeDarko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today's Game]]> 3355159 The NBA of the moment is a league of hugely charismatic celebrities, crackling aesthetic intrigue, sociopolitical undercurrents, and raw humanity: every Kobe Bryant pump-fake or LeBron James dunk holds within it a Shaq-size load of meaning. The Macro-Phenomenal NBA Almanac is a one-of-a-kind guide to this tumultuous and exciting league. In a series of brilliantly illustrated chapters—from Master Builders like Tim Duncan to Destiny’s Kids like Amare Stoudemire to Lost Souls like Lamar Odom—the almanac breaks down the styles of the NBA’s most colorful characters, showing what each one reveals through his play and conduct, both on the court and off. Filled with some of the smartest, funniest sportswriting known to fankind, this book will cast an entirely new light on one of our favorite games.]]> 224 Bethlehem Shoals 1596915617 Darren 5 4.28 2008 FreeDarko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today's Game
author: Bethlehem Shoals
name: Darren
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/01/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores]]> 2202230 WINNER OF THREE EISNER AWARDS

Featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES and on NPR, Y: THE LAST MAN is the gripping saga of Yorick Brown, an unemployed and unmotivated slacker who discovers he is the only male left in the world after a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome. Accompanied by his mischievous monkey, Ampersand, and the mysterious Agent 355, Yorick embarks on a transcontinental journey to find his long-lost girlfriend and discover why he is the last man on earth.

Yorick Brown's long journey through an Earth populated only by women comes to a dramatic, unexpected conclusion in this final volume. Collects issues #55-60 of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's award-winning Vertigo series.

]]> 168 Brian K. Vaughan 140121813X Darren 5 4.33 2008 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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date added: 2008/12/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 9: Motherland]]> 156532
This volume of the critically acclaimed series features Yorick and Agent 355 preparing for their ultimate quest to reunite the last man with his lost love, while the person, people or thing behind the disaster that wiped out half of humanity is revealed!]]> 144 Brian K. Vaughan 1401213510 Darren 5 4.25 2007 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 9: Motherland
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2008/12/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 8: Kimono Dragons]]> 79422 144 Brian K. Vaughan 1401210104 Darren 5 4.21 2006 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 8: Kimono Dragons
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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date added: 2008/12/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 7: Paper Dolls]]> 79426
Collects Y: The Last Man issues #37-#42]]> 144 Brian K. Vaughan 1401210090 Darren 5 4.22 2006 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 7: Paper Dolls
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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date added: 2008/12/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 6: Girl on Girl]]> 156529
Unfortunately, that source is within Ampersand's body, which was last seen disappearing under the arm of a mysterious Japanese mercenary. Now, accompanied by 355 and Dr. Mann, the last man on Earth has embarked on a new and even more hazardous journey - following Ampersand's trail across the Pacific, where danger threatens from below as well as above the waves.

Collects issues 32-36]]> 128 Brian K. Vaughan 1401205011 Darren 5 4.20 2005 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 6: Girl on Girl
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/12/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 5: Ring of Truth]]> 156533 192 Brian K. Vaughan 1401204872 Darren 5 4.27 2005 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 5: Ring of Truth
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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date added: 2008/12/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 4: Safeword]]> 184040
In the care of a fellow Culper Ring member, Yorick Brown is forced to confront his tremendous feelings of survivor guilt that lead him to constantly put his life in danger. Once on the road again, the group runs up against a literal roadblock in Arizona, where the female remains of the Sons of Arizona militia have cut the interstate to keep out any vestiges of the U.S. government.]]> 141 Brian K. Vaughan 1401202322 Darren 5 4.25 2004 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 4: Safeword
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/12/28
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)]]> 13642
Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.]]> 183 Ursula K. Le Guin Darren 5 4.02 1968 A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Darren
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2008/12/10
date added: 2008/12/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Cylons in America : Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica]]> 1802080 Refugees flee persecution with ever-diminishing resources.
Society is fractured along ideological lines, fostering political corruption and Machiavellian opportunism.
Sexy female robots wield guns.

The award-winning and compulsively watchable Battlestar Galactica, "re-imagined" by creator Ronald D. Moore for the twenty-first century, combines many familiar features of science fiction with direct commentary on life in post-9/11 America. At its best, BSG achieves a level of political and social commentary that has not been achieved anywhere else on modern television.

Cylons in America presents an edgy, stimulating, and sometimes witty collection of critical studies of BSG, examining the series' place within popular culture and its engagement with contemporary American society. The book is divided into three sections: the first explores how BSG creates a microcosm of our current world; the second considers the Cylons as a mirror of humanity; and the third raises central questions about science fiction as a genre, about the nature of episodic television, and about the role of media in popular culture. For anyone wishing to explore the many worlds of Battlestar Galactica, Cylons in America provides the perfect point of departure.]]> 278 Tiffany Potter 0826428487 Darren 3 3.84 2007 Cylons in America : Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica
author: Tiffany Potter
name: Darren
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2008/11/03
date added: 2008/11/03
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]]> The Invention of Morel 94486 The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of The Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction’s now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.]]> 103 Adolfo Bioy Casares 1590170571 Darren 5 4.03 1940 The Invention of Morel
author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
name: Darren
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at: 2008/11/02
date added: 2008/11/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Player of Games (Culture, #2)]]> 18630 293 Iain M. Banks 0061053562 Darren 5 4.28 1988 The Player of Games (Culture, #2)
author: Iain M. Banks
name: Darren
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2008/10/01
date added: 2008/10/24
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets]]> 18956 From the creator of HBO's The Wire, the classic book about homicide investigation that became the basis for the hit television show.

The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the center of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world.

David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and this electrifying book tells the true story of a year on the violent streets of an American city. The narrative follows Donald Worden, a veteran investigator; Harry Edgerton, a black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year's most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl.

Originally published fifteen years ago, Homicide became the basis for the acclaimed television show of the same name. This new edition—which includes a new introduction, an afterword, and photographs—revives this classic, riveting tale about the men who work on the dark side of the American experience.]]> 646 David Simon 0805080759 Darren 5 4.34 1991 Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
author: David Simon
name: Darren
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/10/16
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]]> Topdog/Underdog 764270 110 Suzan-Lori Parks 1559362014 Darren 5 3.83 2001 Topdog/Underdog
author: Suzan-Lori Parks
name: Darren
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2008/10/07
date added: 2008/10/07
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]]> The Last Gentleman 84903
Publisher: Spring Arbor/Ingram.]]> 416 Walker Percy 0312243081 Darren 4 3.84 1966 The Last Gentleman
author: Walker Percy
name: Darren
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2008/09/01
date added: 2008/10/07
shelves:
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]]> 52, Vol. 4 1119046 World War III between the planet's super-powered beings.
Discover the final fates of the stars of the series � Booster Gold, Renee Montoya, Black Adam, The Elongated Man, Animal Man, Lobo, Starfire and Adam Strange!

Collecting: 52 40-52]]> 320 Geoff Johns 140121486X Darren 4 3.95 2007 52, Vol. 4
author: Geoff Johns
name: Darren
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/09/15
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]]> 52, Vol. 3 1119044 52 combines the brightest and best talents from the comic book writing field, Geoff Johns (INFINITE CRISIS), Grant Morrison (ALL STAR SUPERMAN), Greg Rucka (WONDER WOMAN) and Mark Waid (KINGDOM COME), working together with the world's finest artists to tell the tale of a world awakening from a nightmare to face a new day.

The DC Universe's most eventful year continues in this latest volume of the acclaimed series with Booster Gold, Renee Montoya, Black Adam, The Elongated Man, Animal Man, Lobo, Starfire and Adam Strange taking center stage.

Collecting 52 #27-39.

]]> 294 Geoff Johns 1401214436 Darren 4 3.95 2007 52, Vol. 3
author: Geoff Johns
name: Darren
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/09/15
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]]> 52, Vol. 2 298470 INFINITE CRISIS, the DC Universe spent a year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. A year in which those heroes were needed more than ever as the fate of the world hung in the balance.

The story of 52 continues in this incredible second volume as Booster Gold's dubious heroism comes under fire, Lex Luthor's scheme for giving ordinary citizens super-powers explodes, and The Question heads into hostile territory to confront Black Adam.

The series combines the brightest and best talents from the comic book writing field: Geoff Johns (INFINITE CRISIS), Grant Morrison (ALL STAR SUPERMAN), Greg Rucka (WONDER WOMAN) and Mark Waid (KINGDOM COME).

Collects 52 #14-26]]> 297 Geoff Johns 1401213642 Darren 3 3.91 2007 52, Vol. 2
author: Geoff Johns
name: Darren
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2007
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/09/15
shelves:
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]]> 52, Vol. 1 160841 Infinite Crisis, the inhabitants of the DC Universe suffered through a year (52 weeks; hence the title) without Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. How does one survive in a dangerous world without superheroes? This paperback, the first of a four-volume series, begins to answer that perilous question? Nonstop action amid planetary anarchy.

52 (2006-2007) Issues 1 - 13]]> 295 Geoff Johns 1401213537 Darren 3 3.89 2007 52, Vol. 1
author: Geoff Johns
name: Darren
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/09/15
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard]]> 22418
In this third volume, Spider Jerusalem begins to crumble under the pressure of sudden and unwanted fame. Having had enough of the warped 23rd century Babylon that he lives in, Spider escapes into a world of bitterness and pills. As he stumbles through this haze of depression and drugs, he must find a way to cover the biggest story of the year, the presidential election. Armed with only his demented mind and dark sense of humor, Spider embarks on an adventure of political cynicism, horrific sex, and unwelcome celebrity which culminates in a shocking and ruinous ending.]]> 142 Warren Ellis 1563895684 Darren 5 4.41 1999 Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard
author: Warren Ellis
name: Darren
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/09/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Transmetropolitan, Vol. 2: Lust for Life]]> 22417
In this volume, Jerusalem targets three of society's most worshipped and warped politics, religion, and television. When Spider tries to shed light on the atrocities of these institutions, he finds himself fleeing a group of hitmen/kidnappers in possession of his ex-wife's frozen head, a distorted creature alleging to be his son, and a vicious talking police dog.]]> 208 Warren Ellis 1563894815 Darren 3 4.34 1999 Transmetropolitan, Vol. 2: Lust for Life
author: Warren Ellis
name: Darren
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/09/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street]]> 22416 72 Warren Ellis 1563894459 Darren 3 4.21 1998 Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street
author: Warren Ellis
name: Darren
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/09/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire]]> 1090823 Smells Like Dead Elephants is a brilliant collection from Matt Taibbi, “a political reporter with the gonzo spirit that made Hunter S. Thompson and P. J. O’Rourke so much fun� (The Washington Post).

Bringing together Taibbi’s most incisive and hilarious work from his “Road Work� column in Rolling Stone, Smells Like Dead Elephants shines an unflinching spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders. Taibbi has plenty to say about George W. Bush, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and all the rest, but he doesn’t just hit inside the Beltway.

He gets involved in the action, infiltrating Senator Conrad Burns’s birthday party under disguise as a lobbyist for a fictional oil firm that wants to drill in the Grand Canyon. He floats into apocalyptic post-Katrina New Orleans in a dinghy with Sean Penn.

He goes to Iraq as an embedded reporter, where he witnesses the mind-boggling dysfunction of our occupation and spends three nights in Abu Ghraib prison. And he reports from two of the most bizarre and telling trials in recent memory: California v. Michael Jackson and the evolution-vs.-intelligent-design trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Equally funny and shocking, this is excellent work from one of our most entertaining writers.]]> 288 Matt Taibbi 0802170412 Darren 5 4.04 2007 Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
author: Matt Taibbi
name: Darren
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/09/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire]]> 1948003
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi set out to describe the nature of George Bush's America in the post-9/11 era and ended up vomiting demons in an evangelical church in Texas, riding the streets of Baghdad in an American convoy to nowhere, following a trail of pork through the halls of Congress, and falling into the rabbit hole of the 9/11 Truth Movement.

He discovered in his travels across the country that the resilient blue state/red state narrative of American politics had become irrelevant. A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off--or radicalized--by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders ("they hate us for our freedom") that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement.

Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American subcultures:
� The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq;
� The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress;
� The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and
� The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants.

Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places. Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era.

"The funniest angry writer and the angriest funny writer since Hunter S. Thompson roared into town."
-- James Wolcott

"�[A] scabrous, hilarious vivisection of our disintegrating nation. …Taibbi shines a light on the corruption, absurdities, and idiot pieties of modern American politics. Beneath his cynical fury, though, are flashes of surprising compassion for the adrift credulous souls who are taken in by it all."
-- Michelle Goldberg]]> 281 Matt Taibbi 0385520344 Darren 4
This book isn't quite the great Matt Taibbi book that we've all been waiting for. It's split in half stylistically, and split in quarters narratively. According to the book's description, Taibbi throws himself into four deranged systems of modern Americana - the army in Iraq, the government in Washington, the Fundamentalist Church, and the 9/11 conspiracy movement. However, Taibbi's adventures in the Fundamentalist Church form the main through line of the book, with the 9/11 Conspiracy angle coming in later and the army/government chapters forming tangents.

Here's where the book doesn't fully succeed. In the Fundamentalist chapters, "The Great Derangement" reads like one of those popular "I Did This" memoirs - you know the kind, the ones that read like highbrow reality shows, where the writer throws himself into a situation ("I said yes for a year," "I read the encyclopedia," "I went undercover in a high school") and turns it into journalism. This kind of journalism can be interesting, but it's naturally a bit narcissistic. People often compare Taibbi to Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist who famously made himself the center of every story. Taibbi discovers several interesting things in his long months within the Fundamentalist Church, but as an ongoing storyline, the angle falls a bit flat.

That's not because it's not fascinating to see inside of the church - as a Catholic used to sleepy Sunday morning sermons, the excitable tongue-speaking ceremonies strike a particular chord of wonder - but because Taibbi is at his best when he's describing how decisions are made in the political scene. Taibbi is fundamentally interested in the workings of the modern bureaucracy - how so much of what we understand about the government is all a show, how so much else is all aimless paperwork, and how the real decisions are made by just a few people.

That being said, Taibbi's investigation of the 9/11 Conspiracy movement seems to combine the best of both worlds. The thread only appears later in the book - Taibbi seems uncertain what to do with a booklength piece, and indeed, his writing style may be best served in short article bursts. However, his portrayal of it as a weird left-wing insane reflection of Fundamentalism feels on-point, and his sitdown with the chief proponents of the theory is a setpiece for the ages.

For long years of GOP dominance, Taibbi was great comfort reading. Although who the hell knows what will happen in November, I suspect that Taibbi would be well served by an era with the Democrats. We all knew that the Republicans were dirtbags, but Taibbi isn't looking for easy targets.]]> 3.93 2008 The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
author: Matt Taibbi
name: Darren
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2008
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/09/03
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review:
Matt Taibbi is probably the most trustworthy journalist writing on American politics today, mainly because he goes out of his way to distrust everyone. Although clearly a liberal, Taibbi is essentially distrustful of everyone in the political scene, whch gives his best writing the qualities of an episode of "The Wire." While everyone was doing an end run victory lap trample all over the Bush years and the GOP, Taibbi was pointedly taking the Democrats to task for undercutting the anti-war movement; while MSNBC was going all Henry V and then King Lear as a left-wing Fox News, Taibbi was following the money from the corporations into the supposedly populist Obama campaign. That last was quite telling - throughout the long Democratic primary season, Taibbi rarely wrote in detail about Obama, perhaps because he didn't want to trust the general Messiah consensus. The man doesn't believe in gushing - he believes in Journalism.

This book isn't quite the great Matt Taibbi book that we've all been waiting for. It's split in half stylistically, and split in quarters narratively. According to the book's description, Taibbi throws himself into four deranged systems of modern Americana - the army in Iraq, the government in Washington, the Fundamentalist Church, and the 9/11 conspiracy movement. However, Taibbi's adventures in the Fundamentalist Church form the main through line of the book, with the 9/11 Conspiracy angle coming in later and the army/government chapters forming tangents.

Here's where the book doesn't fully succeed. In the Fundamentalist chapters, "The Great Derangement" reads like one of those popular "I Did This" memoirs - you know the kind, the ones that read like highbrow reality shows, where the writer throws himself into a situation ("I said yes for a year," "I read the encyclopedia," "I went undercover in a high school") and turns it into journalism. This kind of journalism can be interesting, but it's naturally a bit narcissistic. People often compare Taibbi to Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist who famously made himself the center of every story. Taibbi discovers several interesting things in his long months within the Fundamentalist Church, but as an ongoing storyline, the angle falls a bit flat.

That's not because it's not fascinating to see inside of the church - as a Catholic used to sleepy Sunday morning sermons, the excitable tongue-speaking ceremonies strike a particular chord of wonder - but because Taibbi is at his best when he's describing how decisions are made in the political scene. Taibbi is fundamentally interested in the workings of the modern bureaucracy - how so much of what we understand about the government is all a show, how so much else is all aimless paperwork, and how the real decisions are made by just a few people.

That being said, Taibbi's investigation of the 9/11 Conspiracy movement seems to combine the best of both worlds. The thread only appears later in the book - Taibbi seems uncertain what to do with a booklength piece, and indeed, his writing style may be best served in short article bursts. However, his portrayal of it as a weird left-wing insane reflection of Fundamentalism feels on-point, and his sitdown with the chief proponents of the theory is a setpiece for the ages.

For long years of GOP dominance, Taibbi was great comfort reading. Although who the hell knows what will happen in November, I suspect that Taibbi would be well served by an era with the Democrats. We all knew that the Republicans were dirtbags, but Taibbi isn't looking for easy targets.
]]> Snow Crash 830 Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous� you'll recognize it immediately.]]> 438 Neal Stephenson 0553380958 Darren 5 4.02 1992 Snow Crash
author: Neal Stephenson
name: Darren
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/08/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Silverlock (Silverlock, #1) 104069
This rollicking adventure begins with a shipwreck on an island where notable characters of literature, history, and folklore coexist � Hamlet and Oedipus, Don Quixote and Doctor Faustus, Becky Sharp and Daniel Boone. From carousing with Robin Hood to crossing swords with the Green Knight and stealing a ride on Huck Finn's raft, our traveler, A. Clarence Shandon, undertakes a whirlwind tour of the classics.

And just as the truths of great stories ennoble those who take them to heart, a selfish and cynical drifter is transformed into the gallant knight known as Silverlock.]]> 384 John Myers Myers 0441012477 Darren 0 3.92 1949 Silverlock (Silverlock, #1)
author: John Myers Myers
name: Darren
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at: 2008/08/25
date added: 2008/08/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 3: One Small Step]]> 156530
A Russian Soyuz capsule is coming down from the International Space Station carrying three passengers: one woman and two men. Could this be the end of Yorick's tenure as last living male?]]> 168 Brian K. Vaughan 1401202012 Darren 4 4.21 2004 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 3: One Small Step
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/08/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 2: Cycles]]> 332631 WINNER OF THREE EISNER AWARDS As Yorick Brown, the last man on Earth, begins to make his way across the country to California, he and his companions are forced to make an unscheduled stop in Marrisville, Ohio—a small town with a big secret.

Collects Y: The Last Man issues #6-10]]> 128 Brian K. Vaughan 1401200761 Darren 3 4.22 2003 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 2: Cycles
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/08/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned]]> 156534
But why are he and his faithful companion, the often testy male monkey Ampersand, still alive? He sets out to find the answer (and his girlfriend), while running from angry female Republicans (now running the government), Amazon wannabes that include his own sister (seemingly brainwashed), and other threats.]]> 130 Brian K. Vaughan 1563899809 Darren 3 4.08 2003 Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Darren
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/08/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Making Movies 111537
Why does a director choose a particular script? What must they do in order to keep actors fresh and truthful through take after take of a single scene? How do you stage a shootout—involving more than one hundred extras and three colliding taxis—in the heart of New York’s diamond district? What does it take to keep the studio honchos happy? From the first rehearsal to the final screening, Making Movies is a master’s take, delivered with clarity, candor, and a wealth of anecdote.

For in this book, Sidney Lumet, one of our most consistently acclaimed directors, gives us both a professional memoir and a definitive guide to the art, craft, and business of the motion picture. Drawing on forty years of experience on movies that range from Long Day’s Journey into Night to Network and The Verdict —and with such stars as Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino—Lumet explains how painstaking labor and inspired split-second decisions can result in two hours of screen magic.]]> 218 Sidney Lumet 0679756604 Darren 4 4.29 1995 Making Movies
author: Sidney Lumet
name: Darren
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/08/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Against the Day 409
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

About the Author:
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.]]> 1085 Thomas Pynchon 159420120X Darren 3 4.01 2006 Against the Day
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Darren
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2008/07/31
date added: 2008/07/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Toward a New Film Aesthetic 3086248

How does film theory connect with an audience that experiences film far beyond the confines of the academy? How can film scholars remain relevant to film culture? These are the fundamental question that film scholars seem to have neglected. Film theory, simply put, has detached itself from meaningful discussions of cinema undertaken with mainstream audiences.


Toward a New Film Aesthetic is a radical attempt to connect the study of film with the actual viewing and consumption practices of mainstream cinematic culture. Isaacs argues that theory has rendered the majority of approaches to film insular, self-reflective, obtuse, and-in its worst incarnation-elitist. He redefines cinema aesthetics in terms of the obsessive consumption of cinematic texts that is the hallmark of contemporary film viewing.]]> 240 Bruce Isaacs 0826428711 Darren 4 3.86 2007 Toward a New Film Aesthetic
author: Bruce Isaacs
name: Darren
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2008/07/31
date added: 2008/07/31
shelves:
review:
Awesome reconsideration of film theory. Far more readable than most theoretical texts, yet almost undone by an endless middle chapter - a close reading of "The Matrix" which feels too late and too obvious.
]]> Copenhagen 435488 132 Michael Frayn 0385720793 Darren 5 3.90 1998 Copenhagen
author: Michael Frayn
name: Darren
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2008/07/31
date added: 2008/07/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cold Six Thousand (Underworld USA #2)]]> 4191
In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob’s emissary to the anti-Castro underground.

It goes bad from there. For the next five years these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and Howard Hughes’s takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover’s war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Wilder than L. A. Confidential, more devastating than American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand establishes Ellroy as one of our most fearless novelists.]]> 688 James Ellroy 037572740X Darren 4 4.03 2001 The Cold Six Thousand (Underworld USA #2)
author: James Ellroy
name: Darren
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2008/07/31
date added: 2008/07/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)]]> 77565 517 Dan Simmons 0553288202 Darren 3 4.23 1990 The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)
author: Dan Simmons
name: Darren
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/06/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography]]> 195218 672 David Michaelis 0066213932 Darren 4
Monte Schulz, the son of the great cartoonist, kicked off the roundtable with a massive essay that's divided into three parts: a brief memoir of his time and experience with David Michaelis, in which Monte spent much time and exchanged a number of emails with the biographer, to the point that he thought they had a genuine friendship (proving what should be an old adage, "Do not make friends with your father's biographer."); in part two, he lists the vast amount of grievances he has with the biography, indicating that he has many more and generally despising the entire tone of Michaelis' work; in part three, he provides a minute-by-minute description of his father's battle against, and eventual succumbing to, cancer.

The general theme of Monte Schulz's essay is: His father was not a manic depressive paranoiac with vaguely Freudian issues, he was a kindhearted, swell guy who coached his sons' sports teams, enjoyed playing hockey with his friends at the rink his first wife built, and had a great family he was very close to.

The problem with the Charles Schulz who appears in his son's essay is really the same problem with the Charles Schulz who appears in David Michaelis' book: namely, both Charles Schulz's are based half on reality and half on bullshit, or, more to the point, bullshit conceived by writers with an extremely one-note thesis about the life of Charles Schulz. The difference is that Michaelis' interpretation is interesting, and Monte Schulz's interpretation is almost pointedly boring. Michaelis turns Schulz into an essentially tragic figure, explicitly referencing "Citizen Kane" and "The Great Gatsby" - Monte Schulz turns his father into that particularly American figure, a normal everyday superhero father. Whichever interpretation you believe will probably depend largely on whether you think every man is an Atticus Finch or a Willy Loman.

There are major failings in Michaelis' book, largely because there are so few failings in the books' opening chapters. In incredibly precise (and almost certainly heavily imagined) detail, Michaelis presents us with the youth of Charles Schulz, in the process visualizing a Depression-Era America which reads like an alien planet compared to the world we live in today. The book makes the argument that Schulz essentially wanted to be a cartoonist his whole life, and spent his first few decades following that dream.

The problem is that he achieves that dream relatively early, and indeed, the dream was larger than he could have imagined. As "Peanuts" becomes a megahit, and then a marketing phenomenon, and then one of the real globally recognized brands on the planet, Schulz's life becomes too big, both for Schulz (who, even his son agrees, was somewhat agoraphobic) and for Michaelis. The later chapters present intriguing snippets - how "Peanuts" became a global brand, in the process radically altering advertising and practically inventing the notion of multimedia.

The problem is that Michaelis is really just interested in Schulz, and his interior life, so all of this wild tumult fades to the background at the exact point when we want to learn more about it. Michaelis essentially brushes it all off by saying that Schulz was never really interested in all the other stuff, besides the strip, but that in itself needs more exploring. What did it feel like for this essentially lonely man to see his work everywhere, on everything - in blimps, on T-shirts, in advertisements, on TV and stage? Maybe the problem is that Schulz's life plays like a surrealist melodrama.

However, there's another great failing with Michaelis' book, and this is also a failing shared by Monte Schulz's portrayal - it never takes us to Schulz's drawing table. Earlier in the book, Michaelis wonderfully describes the first time young Sparky Schulz saw original comic strip art, with all of the obvious corrections and blue ink marking where the word balloons should go, but curiously, after taking us within and behind the art form, Michaelis provides only a cursory examination of what cartooning is once Schulz becomes successful. We see how Schulz took incidents from his life and turned it into the strip, but we never quite get the sense of how and why and what it felt like.

At one point in the book, Schulz engages in an affair with a much younger woman. Monte Schulz, and others in the panel, find it distasteful that Michaelis dwells for so long on this affair (it takes up much more space than the description of Schulz's second marriage, which took up about 5 billion percent more of Schulz's life.) The problem is that the younger Schulz doesn't really talk about it at all. This is understandable, since what kid wants to talk about his dad cheating on his mom, but it also proves that, as a biographer, Monte Schulz is just as unqualified AS Michealis, and with vastly less of a sense of what makes for an interesting read.

Michaelis juxtaposes the affair against a series of strips in which Snoopy dreams about his sweetheart. The use of the strips to explicate and explore aspects of Schulz's life is an easy device which reaps huge dividends. At times, it's far too easy. At other times, it's genius. Yet even when it clearly reflects aspects of Schulz's life, there's an essential link in the chain missing. We're told that Schulz claimed to be not all that self-reflective - refusing to see a therapist, rarely talking about himself, claiming that he never used any aspects of his own life in his own writing. Yet clearly, Michaelis concludes, his own life was all over his writing. Okay, but then what about things that weren't taken directly from his life?

Someone on the roundtable notes that Michaelis directs his gaze to just a few characters in the "Peanuts" case, and uses this fact to note Michaelis' forced perspective - purposefully leaving out details in order to prove his case. Okay, fine, but who really wants to read a book about Rerun, Franklin, Pig Pen, Spike the mustached Dog, and Frieda? Even if Michaelis' literary analysis is essentially one-note - Snoopy's in love, JUST LIKE SCHULZ! Charlie Brown plays baseball, JUST LIKE SCHULZ! - he gives a wonderful portrait of the creative evolution of the strip in its first few decades.

Really, there are three biographies here, one excellent, one good, one awkward yet fascinating. The excellent one is the life of young Charles Schulz; the good one is first twenty-five years of Schulz's cartooning, juxtaposed against the rise and development of "Peanuts"; the awkward yet fascinating one is the story of Schulz beginning in his middle age, when he carried on a couple of affairs of the mind (and perhaps one genuine affair), lost one wife, gained a new one, slowly became happier and less interesting in the manner of all great artists who age away from their greatest creative spark. Michaelis' problem is that he mashes the three biographies together. His detractors' problem is that his story is much better, and feels far truer, than theirs.]]> 3.73 2007 Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
author: David Michaelis
name: Darren
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/06/28
shelves:
review:
Luciously readable, fascinating, and flawed account of the life of the creator of Charlie Brown. I first decided to read this book because of a massive roundtable featured in the latest issue of "The Comics Journal," the basic conclusion being that the book does the real-life Schulz no justice. (I read the book, and then read the roundtable.)

Monte Schulz, the son of the great cartoonist, kicked off the roundtable with a massive essay that's divided into three parts: a brief memoir of his time and experience with David Michaelis, in which Monte spent much time and exchanged a number of emails with the biographer, to the point that he thought they had a genuine friendship (proving what should be an old adage, "Do not make friends with your father's biographer."); in part two, he lists the vast amount of grievances he has with the biography, indicating that he has many more and generally despising the entire tone of Michaelis' work; in part three, he provides a minute-by-minute description of his father's battle against, and eventual succumbing to, cancer.

The general theme of Monte Schulz's essay is: His father was not a manic depressive paranoiac with vaguely Freudian issues, he was a kindhearted, swell guy who coached his sons' sports teams, enjoyed playing hockey with his friends at the rink his first wife built, and had a great family he was very close to.

The problem with the Charles Schulz who appears in his son's essay is really the same problem with the Charles Schulz who appears in David Michaelis' book: namely, both Charles Schulz's are based half on reality and half on bullshit, or, more to the point, bullshit conceived by writers with an extremely one-note thesis about the life of Charles Schulz. The difference is that Michaelis' interpretation is interesting, and Monte Schulz's interpretation is almost pointedly boring. Michaelis turns Schulz into an essentially tragic figure, explicitly referencing "Citizen Kane" and "The Great Gatsby" - Monte Schulz turns his father into that particularly American figure, a normal everyday superhero father. Whichever interpretation you believe will probably depend largely on whether you think every man is an Atticus Finch or a Willy Loman.

There are major failings in Michaelis' book, largely because there are so few failings in the books' opening chapters. In incredibly precise (and almost certainly heavily imagined) detail, Michaelis presents us with the youth of Charles Schulz, in the process visualizing a Depression-Era America which reads like an alien planet compared to the world we live in today. The book makes the argument that Schulz essentially wanted to be a cartoonist his whole life, and spent his first few decades following that dream.

The problem is that he achieves that dream relatively early, and indeed, the dream was larger than he could have imagined. As "Peanuts" becomes a megahit, and then a marketing phenomenon, and then one of the real globally recognized brands on the planet, Schulz's life becomes too big, both for Schulz (who, even his son agrees, was somewhat agoraphobic) and for Michaelis. The later chapters present intriguing snippets - how "Peanuts" became a global brand, in the process radically altering advertising and practically inventing the notion of multimedia.

The problem is that Michaelis is really just interested in Schulz, and his interior life, so all of this wild tumult fades to the background at the exact point when we want to learn more about it. Michaelis essentially brushes it all off by saying that Schulz was never really interested in all the other stuff, besides the strip, but that in itself needs more exploring. What did it feel like for this essentially lonely man to see his work everywhere, on everything - in blimps, on T-shirts, in advertisements, on TV and stage? Maybe the problem is that Schulz's life plays like a surrealist melodrama.

However, there's another great failing with Michaelis' book, and this is also a failing shared by Monte Schulz's portrayal - it never takes us to Schulz's drawing table. Earlier in the book, Michaelis wonderfully describes the first time young Sparky Schulz saw original comic strip art, with all of the obvious corrections and blue ink marking where the word balloons should go, but curiously, after taking us within and behind the art form, Michaelis provides only a cursory examination of what cartooning is once Schulz becomes successful. We see how Schulz took incidents from his life and turned it into the strip, but we never quite get the sense of how and why and what it felt like.

At one point in the book, Schulz engages in an affair with a much younger woman. Monte Schulz, and others in the panel, find it distasteful that Michaelis dwells for so long on this affair (it takes up much more space than the description of Schulz's second marriage, which took up about 5 billion percent more of Schulz's life.) The problem is that the younger Schulz doesn't really talk about it at all. This is understandable, since what kid wants to talk about his dad cheating on his mom, but it also proves that, as a biographer, Monte Schulz is just as unqualified AS Michealis, and with vastly less of a sense of what makes for an interesting read.

Michaelis juxtaposes the affair against a series of strips in which Snoopy dreams about his sweetheart. The use of the strips to explicate and explore aspects of Schulz's life is an easy device which reaps huge dividends. At times, it's far too easy. At other times, it's genius. Yet even when it clearly reflects aspects of Schulz's life, there's an essential link in the chain missing. We're told that Schulz claimed to be not all that self-reflective - refusing to see a therapist, rarely talking about himself, claiming that he never used any aspects of his own life in his own writing. Yet clearly, Michaelis concludes, his own life was all over his writing. Okay, but then what about things that weren't taken directly from his life?

Someone on the roundtable notes that Michaelis directs his gaze to just a few characters in the "Peanuts" case, and uses this fact to note Michaelis' forced perspective - purposefully leaving out details in order to prove his case. Okay, fine, but who really wants to read a book about Rerun, Franklin, Pig Pen, Spike the mustached Dog, and Frieda? Even if Michaelis' literary analysis is essentially one-note - Snoopy's in love, JUST LIKE SCHULZ! Charlie Brown plays baseball, JUST LIKE SCHULZ! - he gives a wonderful portrait of the creative evolution of the strip in its first few decades.

Really, there are three biographies here, one excellent, one good, one awkward yet fascinating. The excellent one is the life of young Charles Schulz; the good one is first twenty-five years of Schulz's cartooning, juxtaposed against the rise and development of "Peanuts"; the awkward yet fascinating one is the story of Schulz beginning in his middle age, when he carried on a couple of affairs of the mind (and perhaps one genuine affair), lost one wife, gained a new one, slowly became happier and less interesting in the manner of all great artists who age away from their greatest creative spark. Michaelis' problem is that he mashes the three biographies together. His detractors' problem is that his story is much better, and feels far truer, than theirs.
]]> Amsterdam 6862 Amsterdam is "a dark tour de force, perfectly fashioned" ( The New York Times ) from the bestselling author of Atonement.

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is a newspaper editor. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen�

Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons .]]> 208 Ian McEwan 0385494246 Darren 3
"Amsterdam" has a neat little set-up - two former lovers of a woman go to her funeral, setting them on a path of reminiscence and leading them to make a death pact (in a nutshell, "Don't let me become a doddering old vegetable.") At some point, I forget when, the book splits off in two radically different direction. One of the men, Clive, is a composer who may be a genius, writing a symphony for the Millennium which could make or break his legend. The other man, Vernon, is the editor-in-chief of a London newspaper which desperately needs more readers.

The descriptions of both mens' lives - the dramatic interiority of Clive's writing, the endless bustle of the newsroom - are captured in exquisite detail. Everything about how McEwan writes is "exquisite," and clean, and pleasantly symmetrical. Which is part of the problem. The three books I've read by him all suffer from a great feeling of sarcastic non-dread - his characters, in the book's middle section, so often have such violently optimistic imaginations for the future, that you become sick with the foreshadowing of their oncoming doom.

Vernon and Clive part ways over moral choices that each have to make, which leads both to reconsider the friendship. It feels remarkably true - to a point. The problem is, that point seems to be the point of the whole book. Practically the whole book runs on coincidence, which in itself isn't so bad, except that the coincidence plays like Greek Tragedy where everyone is damned before they even do anything damnable.

I'm torn. In some ways, this book reminds me of some of Graham Greene's looser entertainments - with plots that messily depend on any number of coincidences (in "A Gun For Sale," the girlfriend of a police lieutenant who's investigating an assassination happens to be on the same train car as the assassin.) But Green's books were always fun. The more you read "Amsterdam," the more it reads like a misanthropic anti-fun parable, with a simple gloomy message: Don't make friends, and don't outlive your ex-girlfriends.]]> 3.46 1998 Amsterdam
author: Ian McEwan
name: Darren
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/06/28
shelves:
review:
I've read three books by McEwan now - this one, "The Innocent," and "Atonement" - and although "Amsterdam" isn't nearly as good as the other two, it provides a nice microcosmic explanation for why McEwan is a wonderful writer and why he's maybe the least fun wonderful writer on the planet.

"Amsterdam" has a neat little set-up - two former lovers of a woman go to her funeral, setting them on a path of reminiscence and leading them to make a death pact (in a nutshell, "Don't let me become a doddering old vegetable.") At some point, I forget when, the book splits off in two radically different direction. One of the men, Clive, is a composer who may be a genius, writing a symphony for the Millennium which could make or break his legend. The other man, Vernon, is the editor-in-chief of a London newspaper which desperately needs more readers.

The descriptions of both mens' lives - the dramatic interiority of Clive's writing, the endless bustle of the newsroom - are captured in exquisite detail. Everything about how McEwan writes is "exquisite," and clean, and pleasantly symmetrical. Which is part of the problem. The three books I've read by him all suffer from a great feeling of sarcastic non-dread - his characters, in the book's middle section, so often have such violently optimistic imaginations for the future, that you become sick with the foreshadowing of their oncoming doom.

Vernon and Clive part ways over moral choices that each have to make, which leads both to reconsider the friendship. It feels remarkably true - to a point. The problem is, that point seems to be the point of the whole book. Practically the whole book runs on coincidence, which in itself isn't so bad, except that the coincidence plays like Greek Tragedy where everyone is damned before they even do anything damnable.

I'm torn. In some ways, this book reminds me of some of Graham Greene's looser entertainments - with plots that messily depend on any number of coincidences (in "A Gun For Sale," the girlfriend of a police lieutenant who's investigating an assassination happens to be on the same train car as the assassin.) But Green's books were always fun. The more you read "Amsterdam," the more it reads like a misanthropic anti-fun parable, with a simple gloomy message: Don't make friends, and don't outlive your ex-girlfriends.
]]> The March 24914 --back cover]]> 363 E.L. Doctorow 0812976150 Darren 5 3.75 2005 The March
author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Darren
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/06/24
shelves:
review:
Reads like Faulkner but plays like "Lord of the Flies" one old-timey wheels pulled by starving horses. William Tecumseh Sherman marches through Georgia and into the Carolinas, destroying the Old South and bringing thousands of people along with him - freed slaves, Union soldiers, Confederate prisoners, Southern refugees, doctors and photographers and a black girl who looks white and dresses like like a drummer boy. What all great literature should be: full of emotion and ideas, death and life, great men and brave women, cowards and madmen, and even Abe Lincoln puts in an appearance.
]]> <![CDATA[The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court]]> 280410 384 Jeffrey Toobin 0385516401 Darren 5 4.09 2007 The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
author: Jeffrey Toobin
name: Darren
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2008/03/23
date added: 2008/05/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Lush Life 1862313 A National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Lush Life is a tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the other lower east side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidoscopic portrait of the new New York.]]> 464 Richard Price 0374299250 Darren 5 3.73 2008 Lush Life
author: Richard Price
name: Darren
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2008/04/01
date added: 2008/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)]]> 77566 500 Dan Simmons 0553283685 Darren 4 4.26 1989 Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)
author: Dan Simmons
name: Darren
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film]]> 52570 Down and Dirty Pictures chronicles the rise of independent filmmakers and of the twin engines the Sundance Film Festival and Miramax Films that have powered them. Peter Biskind profiles the people who took the independent movement from obscurity to the Oscars, most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, made Miramax an indie powerhouse. Candid, penetrating and controversial, Down and Dirty Pictures is a must read for anyone interested in the film world.]]> 560 Peter Biskind 0684862581 Darren 4 3.79 2004 Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film
author: Peter Biskind
name: Darren
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> The Short-Timers 1542752 192 Gustav Hasford 0553239457 Darren 4 4.25 1979 The Short-Timers
author: Gustav Hasford
name: Darren
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time]]> 1618 226 Mark Haddon 1400032717 Darren 4 3.89 2003 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
author: Mark Haddon
name: Darren
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/03/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay]]> 3985 639 Michael Chabon 0312282990 Darren 5
"Kavalier & Clay" either hit the zeitgeist or invented it - the very same year that the first "X-Men" hit theaters, it carved what might as well be the Great American Novel - rife with World War and passionate distorted love triangles and metaphor made flesh - out of the comic book medium, finding something at once innocent and tremendously, epically tragic in the last of the print media.

The reason I didn't read this book is because my Dad wouldn't stop telling me how much I had to read this book.

It's not that I hate my dad, or that I didn't trust his taste (he has bought enough books to fill a warehouse, if not a library in Alexandria.) It's just that something in his frequent exhortations to read this book in particular bothered me. As if he knew that I liked comics and knew this book was about comics, then put two and two together. Like if he knew that I liked rock music and got me a CD by some random band in the "rock" section of Tower records. I dunno. It's complicated.

I wish I hadn't taken so long, but at the same time, it felt extra special to read this book (which took less than a week) now. Like I was finally putting aside the rebellious teenage part of me. Or like the kid who read "The Mighty Thor" to tatters in second grade was meeting the man I almost am.

The end of this book is so beautiful - not what happens, so much as the exact, perfect manner in which it is written - that I dare you not to shed a couple dozen tears.]]> 4.18 2000 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
author: Michael Chabon
name: Darren
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2008/03/23
date added: 2008/03/24
shelves:
review:
I have an embarrassing revelation to make about this book. Specifically, I have an embarrassing revelation to make about why it took me so long to read this book. Because there is no real reason why it should have taken me almost eight years to getting around to reading "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," because I am, in many ways, exactly the kind of person it was written for. I collected upwards of seven comic books per week throughout elementary school, but because this was the worst period in comic book history, I never had anyone to talk to about my greatest obsession - no one who followed the years-long plotlines as closely, no one who knew the names of every bad writer who tried to do something about Spiderman in the mid-90s, who knew the secret origins of every "New" Superman in that fallow action-figure-baiting period after his untimely "Death."

"Kavalier & Clay" either hit the zeitgeist or invented it - the very same year that the first "X-Men" hit theaters, it carved what might as well be the Great American Novel - rife with World War and passionate distorted love triangles and metaphor made flesh - out of the comic book medium, finding something at once innocent and tremendously, epically tragic in the last of the print media.

The reason I didn't read this book is because my Dad wouldn't stop telling me how much I had to read this book.

It's not that I hate my dad, or that I didn't trust his taste (he has bought enough books to fill a warehouse, if not a library in Alexandria.) It's just that something in his frequent exhortations to read this book in particular bothered me. As if he knew that I liked comics and knew this book was about comics, then put two and two together. Like if he knew that I liked rock music and got me a CD by some random band in the "rock" section of Tower records. I dunno. It's complicated.

I wish I hadn't taken so long, but at the same time, it felt extra special to read this book (which took less than a week) now. Like I was finally putting aside the rebellious teenage part of me. Or like the kid who read "The Mighty Thor" to tatters in second grade was meeting the man I almost am.

The end of this book is so beautiful - not what happens, so much as the exact, perfect manner in which it is written - that I dare you not to shed a couple dozen tears.
]]> Magic for Beginners 66657 Stranger Things Happen: effervescent blends of quirky humor and pathos that transform stock themes of genre fiction into the stuff of delicate lyrical fantasy.

In "Stone Animals," a house's haunting takes the unusual form of hordes of rabbits that camp out nightly on the front lawn. This proves just one of several benign but inexplicable phenomena that begin to pull apart the family that's just moved into the house.

The title story beautifully captures the unpredictable potential of teenage lives through its account of a group of adolescent school friends whose experiences subtly parallel events in a surreal TV fantasy series.

Zombies serve as the focus for a young man's anxieties about his future in "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and offer suggestive counterpoint to the lives of two convenience store clerks who serve them in "The Hortlak."

Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.]]> 297 Kelly Link 0156031876 Darren 4 3.84 2005 Magic for Beginners
author: Kelly Link
name: Darren
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2008/03/01
date added: 2008/03/17
shelves:
review:
Kelly Link is the funniest, saddest, wisest writer working today. I can't stand the title, of the book or of the short story, but her prose glistens like silver bullets under a mystical midnight dreary.
]]> Lolita 7604 Librarian's note: Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141182537.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.]]> 368 Vladimir Nabokov 0679723161 Darren 5 3.87 1955 Lolita
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Darren
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/03/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker]]> 54890
“Advance word on Con Air said that it was all about an airplane with an unusually dangerous and potentially lethal load. Big deal. You should try the lunches they serve out of Newark. Compared with the chicken napalm I ate on my last flight, the men in Con Air are about as dangerous as balloons.�

Anthony Lane on The Bridges of Madison County �

“I got my copy at the airport, behind a guy who was buying Playboy’s Book of Lingerie , and I think he had the better deal. He certainly looked happy with his purchase, whereas I had to ask for a paper bag.�

Anthony Lane on Martha Stewart�

“Super-skilled, free of fear, the last word in human efficiency, Martha Stewart is the woman who convinced a million Americans that they have the time, the means, the right, and—damn it—the duty to pipe a little squirt of soft cheese into the middle of a snow pea, and to continue piping until there are â€fifty to sixtyâ€� stuffed peas raring to go.â€�

For ten years, Anthony Lane has delighted New Yorker readers with his film reviews, book reviews, and profiles that range from Buster Keaton to Vladimir Nabokov to Ernest Shackleton. Nobody’s Perfect is an unforgettable collection of Lane’s trademark wit, satire, and insight that will satisfy both the long addicted and the not so familiar.]]> 784 Anthony Lane 0375714340 Darren 4 4.14 2002 Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker
author: Anthony Lane
name: Darren
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2006/01/01
date added: 2008/02/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier]]> 107009
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is an elaborately designed, cutting edge volume that will include a Tijuana Bible insert and a 3-D section complete with custom glasses, as well as additional text pieces, maps, and a stunning, cutaway double page spread of Captain Nemo's Nautilus submarine by acclaimed LOEG artist Kevin O Neill.]]> 208 Alan Moore 140120306X Darren 5
But Moore's "Black Dossier" has several things going for it that Sim didn't. Moore is not a paranoid ideologue who believes women's existence contributes to a breakdown of humanity on every social, political, economic, and cultural level. Moore is less interested in religion than in fiction. Moore has a profound sense of humor.

Although there is a plot to "The Black Dossier," the better part of the book is essentially an appendix to the first two volumes, exploring the world which used to appear steampunk and now stands revealed as the predominant work of metafiction of the early 21st century. How much you enjoy "Black Dossier" may depend on which you liked more - "The Lord of the Rings" or "The Silmarillion." A chapter imitates the style of PG Wodehouse's "Jeeves and Wooster" stories with the substance of HP Lovecraft - importantly, the chapter is funny even if you have no idea who either of those men are. The same holds true for the imitation of primitive erotica, in which sex goddess Fanny Hill fuckscrews her way through several fantasy worlds, and "Faerie's Fortune Founded," a lost fragment of a fictional Shakespeare play, which is as readable as any of Shakespeare's plays - that is, for some people it will be amazing, and for some people it will be unreadable. (The same may be true for "The Crazy Wide Forever" by Sal Paradyse, imitation-Kerouac with no punctuation and random strings of words. It is possible that, if you like Kerouac, you will like this - to me, it is Moore's one real failure in the book, a waxwork homage that sacrifices entertainment for verisimilitude, like Gus Van Sant's "Psycho.")

I don't quite think "Black Dossier" is as complete a work as "Watchmen" or "From Hell" - both of those series took elaborate flights of fancy and tangent, but both also never lost track of the say-it-again-STORY. The narrative in "Black Dossier" is a chase with the bare minimum of tension, with plenty of time for sightseeing along the way (it is telling that the people who are being chased have plenty of time to read the titular Dossier, taking time out from their own book to read another one). It ends with an elaborate scene set in the Blazing World - one of the first imaginary worlds created for literature, making it Moore's alpha and omega, a paradise for fictional creations of all sorts (in the background, you will see copyright-baiting variations on Charlie Brown and Captain Marvel, and you will also see fairies fucking in midair). This scene is essentially an elaborate party to rival Trimalchio; it requires 3-D glasses; it lacks any real sense of climax. Prospero, from Shakespeare's "The Tempest," leads us away with a soliloquy about nothing less than the existence of fiction. Just as Raging Bull ends with de Niro doing la Motta doing Brando doing Terry Malloy, so "Black Dossier" ends with Moore doing Prospero doing Shakespeare doing Prospero. Round and round.

The speech reads like a conclusion - to the series, to Moore's career, to the comic book medium, to human imagination. Intriguingly, this is not the end of the series - Moore has promised a genuine third volume next year, so expect it for Christmas 2012. Still, this is certainly the end of Moore's thesis for the "League" project. What started out as a funny riff on the team comic book has become the ur-story of all fiction. In this, Moore's book stands next to Don Rosa's "The life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," which absorbed hundreds of stories written by Carl Barks about Scrooge McDuck and linked them into a common history, resulting in a work that was both grander (in sweep) and more detailed (in artistic style and comic substance) than Barks was ever allowed. Oddly, this is not the first time a comic book creator has used Prospero as a metaphorical stand-in for all fictional creations - Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" ended with an issue devoted to Shakespeare's "The Tempest."
]]> 3.46 2007 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
author: Alan Moore
name: Darren
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2007/12/26
date added: 2008/02/27
shelves:
review:
"The Black Dossier" is not nearly as fun as the earlier editions of "The League." As it begins to dawn on you that a considerable stretch of the book is dominated by text-only pages, you may begin to worry that Moore has become yet another Dave Sim - who, as the years passed on his 6000 page "Cerebus" saga, began to sprinkle in ever-more turgid parodies of great authors, longwinded self-serving rants against feminism and Marxism, and over a hundred pages of theory on the Torah, written in small type, in the voice of a stammering drunken Aardvark, narrated to a fictionalized Woody Allen. With the exception of a beautiful homage to Oscar Wilde, Sim's prose is as uniformly awful as his graphic storytelling is transcendent.

But Moore's "Black Dossier" has several things going for it that Sim didn't. Moore is not a paranoid ideologue who believes women's existence contributes to a breakdown of humanity on every social, political, economic, and cultural level. Moore is less interested in religion than in fiction. Moore has a profound sense of humor.

Although there is a plot to "The Black Dossier," the better part of the book is essentially an appendix to the first two volumes, exploring the world which used to appear steampunk and now stands revealed as the predominant work of metafiction of the early 21st century. How much you enjoy "Black Dossier" may depend on which you liked more - "The Lord of the Rings" or "The Silmarillion." A chapter imitates the style of PG Wodehouse's "Jeeves and Wooster" stories with the substance of HP Lovecraft - importantly, the chapter is funny even if you have no idea who either of those men are. The same holds true for the imitation of primitive erotica, in which sex goddess Fanny Hill fuckscrews her way through several fantasy worlds, and "Faerie's Fortune Founded," a lost fragment of a fictional Shakespeare play, which is as readable as any of Shakespeare's plays - that is, for some people it will be amazing, and for some people it will be unreadable. (The same may be true for "The Crazy Wide Forever" by Sal Paradyse, imitation-Kerouac with no punctuation and random strings of words. It is possible that, if you like Kerouac, you will like this - to me, it is Moore's one real failure in the book, a waxwork homage that sacrifices entertainment for verisimilitude, like Gus Van Sant's "Psycho.")

I don't quite think "Black Dossier" is as complete a work as "Watchmen" or "From Hell" - both of those series took elaborate flights of fancy and tangent, but both also never lost track of the say-it-again-STORY. The narrative in "Black Dossier" is a chase with the bare minimum of tension, with plenty of time for sightseeing along the way (it is telling that the people who are being chased have plenty of time to read the titular Dossier, taking time out from their own book to read another one). It ends with an elaborate scene set in the Blazing World - one of the first imaginary worlds created for literature, making it Moore's alpha and omega, a paradise for fictional creations of all sorts (in the background, you will see copyright-baiting variations on Charlie Brown and Captain Marvel, and you will also see fairies fucking in midair). This scene is essentially an elaborate party to rival Trimalchio; it requires 3-D glasses; it lacks any real sense of climax. Prospero, from Shakespeare's "The Tempest," leads us away with a soliloquy about nothing less than the existence of fiction. Just as Raging Bull ends with de Niro doing la Motta doing Brando doing Terry Malloy, so "Black Dossier" ends with Moore doing Prospero doing Shakespeare doing Prospero. Round and round.

The speech reads like a conclusion - to the series, to Moore's career, to the comic book medium, to human imagination. Intriguingly, this is not the end of the series - Moore has promised a genuine third volume next year, so expect it for Christmas 2012. Still, this is certainly the end of Moore's thesis for the "League" project. What started out as a funny riff on the team comic book has become the ur-story of all fiction. In this, Moore's book stands next to Don Rosa's "The life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," which absorbed hundreds of stories written by Carl Barks about Scrooge McDuck and linked them into a common history, resulting in a work that was both grander (in sweep) and more detailed (in artistic style and comic substance) than Barks was ever allowed. Oddly, this is not the first time a comic book creator has used Prospero as a metaphorical stand-in for all fictional creations - Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" ended with an issue devoted to Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

]]> Absalom, Absalom! 373755 316 William Faulkner 0679732187 Darren 5 3.98 1936 Absalom, Absalom!
author: William Faulkner
name: Darren
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1936
rating: 5
read at: 2003/08/01
date added: 2008/02/27
shelves:
review:
Every sentence in this book - every two-page, multi-punctuated, endlessly spinning sentence - will make your head explode with swoony vocabulated bliss and make your heart implode with emotions you didn't know existed.
]]> Ulysses 338798
According to Declan Kiberd, "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking". Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early 20th-century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland's relationship to Britain.

The novel is highly allusive and also imitates the styles of different periods of English literature. Since its publication, the book has attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from an obscenity trial in the United States in 1921 to protracted textual "Joyce Wars." The novel's stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—replete with puns, parodies, and allusions—as well as its rich characterisation and broad humour have led it to be regarded as one of the greatest literary works in history; Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday.']]> 783 James Joyce Darren 5 Duh. 3.72 1922 Ulysses
author: James Joyce
name: Darren
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2003/01/01
date added: 2008/02/27
shelves:
review:
Duh.
]]> Suspects 2245184 288 David Thomson 1842431943 Darren 3
"Suspects" is an early work by Thomson - his most experimental, his most brave (not because no one ever thought of it, but because no one would ever think it was a good idea), and his silliest. In several dozen biographical entries, he traces out the life stories of characters from movies - mostly noir films, mostly from the 40s and 50s, although Jack Torrance from "The Shining" and even one Jay Landesman Gatsby make an appearance, too. It is hard to know exactly how to read this book - it may be the most metaphysical film criticism ever created, or perhaps an elaborate work of fan fiction. Several entries add new, unexpected layers to old stories - Ilsa wasn't really in love with good old Victor Laszlo, she was just pretending to be his wife for the Resistance. Many entries end up overlapping. At first, this overlap can seem silly. By the end, when it becomes clear just who the narrator is and who his children have grown up to be, it is mesmerizing.

Mesmerizing is a good word for this book; I'm not sure you can call it "great," though. I noticed a definite lag of interest whenever I reached an entry based on a film I had not seen - and, indeed, I ended up skipping many of these entries, for fear of ruining the plot of a good movie.

There is great repetition - nearly every character is born with one name and changes to another one; too many of them find their way to Hollywood; incest recurs so often as to bemuse more than horrify (which may be Thomson's point.) Thomson is erudite without fail, and the book is fantastically easy to read, but its parts are much great than its whole.]]> 3.38 1985 Suspects
author: David Thomson
name: Darren
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2008/02/20
date added: 2008/02/26
shelves:
review:
Almost all of David Thomson's writing is conceptual in one way or another, mixing suspected fact with outright fiction - his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" critiques the lives of motion picture performers as if their very existence was an artistic performance, and each of their film was a subplot along the way; "The Whole Equation" spins a history of Hollywood using, for primary sources, Fitzgerald's book "The Last Tycoon" and Robert Towne's script for Chinatown (both, Thomson argues, unfinished works - Fitzgerald died before he could complete his final novel, and Towne was never given the ability to write the many sequels he had planned for Jake Gittes and Los Angeles); his latest book, "Nicole Kidman," adopts the tone of an extended "Biographical Dictionary" entry, but focuses on one person and takes the first-person tone of a demented, helpless gothic romance.

"Suspects" is an early work by Thomson - his most experimental, his most brave (not because no one ever thought of it, but because no one would ever think it was a good idea), and his silliest. In several dozen biographical entries, he traces out the life stories of characters from movies - mostly noir films, mostly from the 40s and 50s, although Jack Torrance from "The Shining" and even one Jay Landesman Gatsby make an appearance, too. It is hard to know exactly how to read this book - it may be the most metaphysical film criticism ever created, or perhaps an elaborate work of fan fiction. Several entries add new, unexpected layers to old stories - Ilsa wasn't really in love with good old Victor Laszlo, she was just pretending to be his wife for the Resistance. Many entries end up overlapping. At first, this overlap can seem silly. By the end, when it becomes clear just who the narrator is and who his children have grown up to be, it is mesmerizing.

Mesmerizing is a good word for this book; I'm not sure you can call it "great," though. I noticed a definite lag of interest whenever I reached an entry based on a film I had not seen - and, indeed, I ended up skipping many of these entries, for fear of ruining the plot of a good movie.

There is great repetition - nearly every character is born with one name and changes to another one; too many of them find their way to Hollywood; incest recurs so often as to bemuse more than horrify (which may be Thomson's point.) Thomson is erudite without fail, and the book is fantastically easy to read, but its parts are much great than its whole.
]]> <![CDATA[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages]]> 20941 The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a vision. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the great works of the western literary tradition and essential writers of the ages. The Western Canon was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.]]> 546 Harold Bloom 1573225142 Darren 1 "In conversation with John Dryden, [Milton] once confessed rather too readily that Spenser was his 'Great Original,' a remark that I have come to understand as a defense against Shakespeare."
"Oedipus, I suggest, was hauled in by Freud and grafted onto Hamlet largely in order to cover up an obligation to Shakespeare."
"Except for Shakespeare, Chaucer is foremost among writers in the English language."
'Knowing more English would not have enlightened Tolstoy; his fury at Shakespeare was defensive, though presumably he was unaware of it.'

Harold Bloom represents everything that is wrong with everything I usually tend to hold dear - intelligence, literature, higher education, lofty pretension, the belief that writing about artwork can be just as important as the artwork itself, the notion that the critic is something akin to a holy man. He is the parasite suckling the sweet nectar of the gods out of the wide expanse of literature. We are all very, very lucky that he has never deigned to notice any but the most obvious modern authors (Pynchon, Roth, Delillo, and McCarthy.)

Of course, that would involve writing about people who are alive and could defend themselves, and Bloom has the courage of a dozen Grail knights when it comes to making the most far-spanning assumptions about very great, very intelligent, very talented, very dead men. I'm not quite sure how it is that Bloom has become so highly regarded in the study of literature, because he basically has one weapon in his arsenal which he pulls out at nearly every juncture. The man writes "Shakespeare" often enough to demand a drinking game. In the very first paragraph of his essay on Milton, he writes "Shakespeare" 9 times. This is a rare moment of restraint for Bloom.

Okay, okay, I am not simple. I understand that Bloom has chosen to frame his western canon through the prism of Shakespeare. In this way, Bloom's writing is very strikingly similar to the writing of one of my favorite non-fiction novelists, David Thomson, who, in "The Whole Equation," views the history of Hollywood through the double lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" and Robert Towne's "Chinatown." The difference is that Thomson is focusing on their treatment of Los Angeles, whereas Bloom is focusing on how Shakespeare invented literature, awareness, and humanity (one of his books is "Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human").

There is another important difference between Thomson and Bloom: Thomson would have been a great novelist if he weren't so obsessed with the movies (he says as much, or comes close to saying that, very often in his writing); Bloom would have been a second-rate used car salesman if someone, somewhere, hadn't given him the awful idea that he should write about writing.

I realize Bloom knows more about literature than practically anyone on the face of the earth. This does not hide the fact that he understands literature less than your average ten-year-old and, moreover, that he is so unremittingly insistent upon some unchanging interpretation of literature, and so humorless in his consideration of writers and their writing, that his continued presence in the literary world is an insult to every single author he claims to praise in the book, Will Shakespeare included.

Over and over again, like a king besieged by madness in an empty castle, he rails against the numerous people and forces who are arrayed against him - feminists, marxists, culturists (he references African-American academics specifically and all non-white academics generally.) This at first seems peppy and un-PC, then lightly racist and sexist, before it settles in that Bloom simply has very little interest in most non-Caucasian, non-male, non-Bloom concepts.

And there's the Shakespeare. You could argue (Bloom doesn't, but strongly implies to the point of embarrassment) that Shakespeare's influence has trickled down through the ages and social strata, so that an illiterate Sudanese orphan or a third-generation Turkish "guest worker" immigrant in Berlin or Paris Hilton all live and breathe in his influence, just as you can argue that a butterfly in Brazil flaps a hurricane into existence on the other side of the world or that, when no one is around, trees that fall in forests hum "Stairway to Heaven" on their way down. Because you can't really prove anything, you can say everything. David Thomson gets away with this kind of thing because he is witty, because he carries himself like a fellow traveler, and because he has a certain British self-deflation which gives his most madcap suggestions a twinkle - as when, in his biography of Orson Welles, he casually notes that young Orson was racing through local Irish lassies in a small province just about nine months before Peter O'Toole was born.

Above all, David Thomson (and I am talking about him so much only because there is so little to say about Bloom) is daring, and perhaps self-loathing, enough to question whether or not his primary influence - the filmic art - is actually rather silly, if not ruinous. Bloom, conversely, declares, "We owe to Shakespeare not only our representation of cognition but much of our capacity for cognition." Bloom is openly declaring literature as religion, Shakespeare as God (and the other way around, too) - which would place him, humbly, as the great outspoken prophet of a debased age - a Daniel in Babylon.

Too bad the tigers would just spit him back out.]]> 3.88 1994 The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
author: Harold Bloom
name: Darren
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1994
rating: 1
read at: 2008/01/31
date added: 2008/02/26
shelves:
review:
"The only spirit in 'Ulysses' is Shakespeare."
"In conversation with John Dryden, [Milton] once confessed rather too readily that Spenser was his 'Great Original,' a remark that I have come to understand as a defense against Shakespeare."
"Oedipus, I suggest, was hauled in by Freud and grafted onto Hamlet largely in order to cover up an obligation to Shakespeare."
"Except for Shakespeare, Chaucer is foremost among writers in the English language."
'Knowing more English would not have enlightened Tolstoy; his fury at Shakespeare was defensive, though presumably he was unaware of it.'

Harold Bloom represents everything that is wrong with everything I usually tend to hold dear - intelligence, literature, higher education, lofty pretension, the belief that writing about artwork can be just as important as the artwork itself, the notion that the critic is something akin to a holy man. He is the parasite suckling the sweet nectar of the gods out of the wide expanse of literature. We are all very, very lucky that he has never deigned to notice any but the most obvious modern authors (Pynchon, Roth, Delillo, and McCarthy.)

Of course, that would involve writing about people who are alive and could defend themselves, and Bloom has the courage of a dozen Grail knights when it comes to making the most far-spanning assumptions about very great, very intelligent, very talented, very dead men. I'm not quite sure how it is that Bloom has become so highly regarded in the study of literature, because he basically has one weapon in his arsenal which he pulls out at nearly every juncture. The man writes "Shakespeare" often enough to demand a drinking game. In the very first paragraph of his essay on Milton, he writes "Shakespeare" 9 times. This is a rare moment of restraint for Bloom.

Okay, okay, I am not simple. I understand that Bloom has chosen to frame his western canon through the prism of Shakespeare. In this way, Bloom's writing is very strikingly similar to the writing of one of my favorite non-fiction novelists, David Thomson, who, in "The Whole Equation," views the history of Hollywood through the double lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" and Robert Towne's "Chinatown." The difference is that Thomson is focusing on their treatment of Los Angeles, whereas Bloom is focusing on how Shakespeare invented literature, awareness, and humanity (one of his books is "Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human").

There is another important difference between Thomson and Bloom: Thomson would have been a great novelist if he weren't so obsessed with the movies (he says as much, or comes close to saying that, very often in his writing); Bloom would have been a second-rate used car salesman if someone, somewhere, hadn't given him the awful idea that he should write about writing.

I realize Bloom knows more about literature than practically anyone on the face of the earth. This does not hide the fact that he understands literature less than your average ten-year-old and, moreover, that he is so unremittingly insistent upon some unchanging interpretation of literature, and so humorless in his consideration of writers and their writing, that his continued presence in the literary world is an insult to every single author he claims to praise in the book, Will Shakespeare included.

Over and over again, like a king besieged by madness in an empty castle, he rails against the numerous people and forces who are arrayed against him - feminists, marxists, culturists (he references African-American academics specifically and all non-white academics generally.) This at first seems peppy and un-PC, then lightly racist and sexist, before it settles in that Bloom simply has very little interest in most non-Caucasian, non-male, non-Bloom concepts.

And there's the Shakespeare. You could argue (Bloom doesn't, but strongly implies to the point of embarrassment) that Shakespeare's influence has trickled down through the ages and social strata, so that an illiterate Sudanese orphan or a third-generation Turkish "guest worker" immigrant in Berlin or Paris Hilton all live and breathe in his influence, just as you can argue that a butterfly in Brazil flaps a hurricane into existence on the other side of the world or that, when no one is around, trees that fall in forests hum "Stairway to Heaven" on their way down. Because you can't really prove anything, you can say everything. David Thomson gets away with this kind of thing because he is witty, because he carries himself like a fellow traveler, and because he has a certain British self-deflation which gives his most madcap suggestions a twinkle - as when, in his biography of Orson Welles, he casually notes that young Orson was racing through local Irish lassies in a small province just about nine months before Peter O'Toole was born.

Above all, David Thomson (and I am talking about him so much only because there is so little to say about Bloom) is daring, and perhaps self-loathing, enough to question whether or not his primary influence - the filmic art - is actually rather silly, if not ruinous. Bloom, conversely, declares, "We owe to Shakespeare not only our representation of cognition but much of our capacity for cognition." Bloom is openly declaring literature as religion, Shakespeare as God (and the other way around, too) - which would place him, humbly, as the great outspoken prophet of a debased age - a Daniel in Babylon.

Too bad the tigers would just spit him back out.
]]> Arkansas 2066546 230 John Brandon 1932416900 Darren 5 3.73 2008 Arkansas
author: John Brandon
name: Darren
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2008/02/25
shelves:
review:
This book is perfection. If Cormac McCarthy were as funny as Elmore Leonard and they wrote about aimless twentysomethings vaguely attempting to commit a crime but mostly just talking about nothing in particular, it would read something like this. God damn, John Brandon, you are a discovery for the centuries.
]]> The Inner Circle 394241 New York Times bestselling and National Book Award- nominated novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle has spun an even more dazzling tale that will delight both his longtime devotees and a legion of new fans. Boyle’s tenth novel, The Inner Circle has it all: fabulous characters, a rollicking plot, and more sex than pioneering researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey ever dreamed of documenting . . . well, almost.

A love story, The Inner Circle is narrated by John Milk, a virginal young man who in 1940 accepts a job as an assistant to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an extraordinarily charming professor of zoology at Indiana University who has just discovered his life’s true calling: sex. As a member of Kinsey’s “inner circle� of researchers, Milk (and his beautiful new wife) is called on to participate in sexual experiments that become increasingly uninhibited—and problematic for his marriage. For in his later years Kinsey (who behind closed doors is a sexual enthusiast of the first order) ever more recklessly pushed the boundaries both personally and professionally.

While Boyle doesn’t resist making the most of this delicious material, The Inner Circle is at heart a very moving and very loving look at sex, marriage, and jealousy that will have readers everywhere reassessing their own relationships—because, in the end, “love is all there is.�

]]> 418 T. Coraghessan Boyle 0670033448 Darren 4 3.60 2003 The Inner Circle
author: T. Coraghessan Boyle
name: Darren
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2006/01/01
date added: 2008/02/25
shelves:
review:
Sexy, funny, endlessly readable.
]]> <![CDATA[A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1)]]> 13496
Sweeping from a harsh land of cold to a summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, A Game of Thrones tells a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; a child is lost in the twilight between life and death; and a determined woman undertakes a treacherous journey to protect all she holds dear. Amid plots and counter-plots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, allies and enemies, the fate of the Starks hangs perilously in the balance, as each side endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.]]> 835 George R.R. Martin 0553588486 Darren 4 4.44 1996 A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Darren
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2006/01/01
date added: 2008/02/25
shelves:
review:
The beginning of the greatest series in modern fantasy - its "Sopranos," its "War & Peace" - is the sneakiest volume in the series so far. Before your eyes, Martin creates a world that seems familiar (a bit of Arthurian legend, a touch of "Lord of the Rings," the bare whiff of medieval history) and then shatters it, steadily, subtly, ingeniously. Probably the first fantasy series to spend more time on politics than epic battles - or maybe it's wiser to call this the first political drama to feature wolves the size of grizzly bears, barbarian lords making love to dragon heiresses, and a continent where summers last for years and winters last for decades.
]]> Tender Is the Night 46164 Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.]]> 430 F. Scott Fitzgerald Darren 4 3.81 1934 Tender Is the Night
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Darren
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1934
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/31
date added: 2008/02/25
shelves:
review:
A dark, weird book about dark, weird sex. Fitzgerald has the most marvelously strange tone of any writer out there - the first time you read him, you might think you were reading a particularly bloodless, stilted Victorian-era romance. Except that tone - the deadness, the anxious anti-emotion - is the whole point of the book. It's an outlandishly straight-faced comedy of manners - grandly sarcastic, and beautiful, at the same time. Just as "La Dolce Vita" is a closer approximation of "The Great Gatsby" than any of the actual film adaptations, so "8 1/2" - Fellini's overtly autobiographical follow-up - is the perfect match for Fitzgerald's next-one-after-the-big-one.
]]> The Moviegoer 10739
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is adrift. He occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a quest - a harebrained search for authenticity that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the gaudy chaos of the French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, "The Moviegoer" is a genuine American classic.]]> 242 Walker Percy 0375701966 Darren 5
Like "The Stranger" and "The Catcher in the Rye," this book is told in the first person by a normal fellow who is utterly abnormal, who has a perfect grasp of the amorality of his own life but seems at the same time confused by the most basic concepts of humanity, who is at once completely self-realized and yet, as we see just a very few yet potent times, may not really understand himself, or his story one bit.

"The Moviegoer" is a little bit less nihilistic than "The Stranger" and perhaps not as impeccably well-constructed as "The Catcher in the Rye" - everyone who has ever taken a 48-hour trip to New York imagines they will be following in the pathway of Holden Caulfield. But it is a rare thing of beauty, delicately shading together so many moods and so many complex emotions - pseudo-incestuous romance and lustfully vivid instant love and an inscrutable sense of cosmic purpose that can be forgotten in half a moment.]]> 3.66 1961 The Moviegoer
author: Walker Percy
name: Darren
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2008/02/04
date added: 2008/02/25
shelves:
review:
When you read a book like this - and the only other books like this are "The Stranger" and "The Catcher in the Rye" - you have to be just a little bit skeptical of all the supposedly "great" novels which test your patience, your vocabulary, your ability to juggle existential subtlety with thematic overinterpretation and whatever other depth we may ascribe to whatever we don't understand.

Like "The Stranger" and "The Catcher in the Rye," this book is told in the first person by a normal fellow who is utterly abnormal, who has a perfect grasp of the amorality of his own life but seems at the same time confused by the most basic concepts of humanity, who is at once completely self-realized and yet, as we see just a very few yet potent times, may not really understand himself, or his story one bit.

"The Moviegoer" is a little bit less nihilistic than "The Stranger" and perhaps not as impeccably well-constructed as "The Catcher in the Rye" - everyone who has ever taken a 48-hour trip to New York imagines they will be following in the pathway of Holden Caulfield. But it is a rare thing of beauty, delicately shading together so many moods and so many complex emotions - pseudo-incestuous romance and lustfully vivid instant love and an inscrutable sense of cosmic purpose that can be forgotten in half a moment.
]]> Atonement 6867
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.]]> 351 Ian McEwan 038572179X Darren 4 3.94 2001 Atonement
author: Ian McEwan
name: Darren
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles]]> 620573
"Easily the best book on Orson Welles."  --The New Yorker

Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood as a boy genius, became a legend with a single perfect film, and then spent the next forty years floundering. But Welles floundered so variously, ingeniously, and extravagantly that he turned failure into "a sustaining tragedy"--his thing, his song.  Now the prodigal genius of the American cinema finally has the biographer he deserves. For, as anyone who has read his novels and criticism knows, David Thomson is one of our most perceptive and splendidly opinionated writers on film.

In Rosebud, Thomson follows the wild arc of Welles's career, from The War of the Worlds broadcast to the triumph of Citizen Kane, the mixed triumph of The Magnificent Ambersons, and the strange and troubling movies that followed. Here, too, is the unfolding of the Welles persona--the grand gestures, the womanizing, the high living, the betrayals. Thomson captures it all with a critical acumen and stylistic dash that make this book not so much a study of Welles's life and work as a glorious companion piece to them.

"Insightful, controversial, and highly readable--Rosebud is biography at its best."  --Cleveland Plain Dealer]]> 480 David Thomson 0679772839 Darren 5 3.54 1996 Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
author: David Thomson
name: Darren
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/01/23
shelves:
review:

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