2015 Final Count: 130
It was a very good year for reading. In total, I read 130 novel-length volumes this year, including some heavies like “Infinite Jest” and an 800-page biography of Alan Turing.…
“Quack This Way” and the merits of prescriptive linguistics
This book is really more a transcribed conversation than anything else, but it is absolutely worth your time. In it, David Foster Wallace and Bryan Garner (of Garner’s Usage Dictionary…
Relatability, Misery Porn, and Denis Johnson’s “The Laughing Monsters”
Denis Johnson’s latest novel is dark. This is not uncharted territory for the man, but the bleakness here is obliterating. There is a detached and passive depression in the…
The Tenth of December, the Limits of Irony (and the Best Kind of Irony)
image via Goodreads Saunders is very much a known entity, but that’s certainly no strike against the man. He’s got a style that (among many other things) seems to both…
The Grapes of Wrath and the Journals Behind the Book
The Grapes of Wrath is another one of those American classics that I somehow avoided reading in high school. Getting to read all of these canonical tomes as an adult…
Hertfielder and Papazien: Why it’s OK to thoroughly enjoy a bad book every now and then
Both of these books are somewhat badly written, at least by the standards I judge writing by. The prose is either unremarkable or flawed, given to cliche and obvious tropes.…
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Grading Debut Novels on a Curve
Debut novels are interesting. I’m a big Vonnegut fan. I’m planning to read all of his novels and then get a tattoo of the asshole he drew in Breakfast of…
The Case Studies of Oliver Sacks: Hallucinations and The Mind’s Eye
I read these two books after being completely taken in by Sacks’ wonderful memoir, On the Move. The thing I found most compelling in that memoir was his naturalistic…
Sam Lipsyte’s “The Ask” and the problem with ironic distance
Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask is very funny. It’s also sufficiently dark and morbid. And it lacks something that I can’t seem to define, so I don’t think it’s really…
Flashman at the Charge, The Flashman Papers, and my spotted history with historical fiction
I had never heard of George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman” books before picking a few up on a recommendation. I’ve got an innate suspicion of historical fiction borne out of an…