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…
Hesse’s “Siddharta”
This one wasn’t for me. Hesse’s popularity as a countercultural icon in America seemed to have led to this book becoming the subject of Zeitgeist-fixation, but in spite of very…
“Rabbit Redux”, Or, John Updike is The Man (and you are free to interpret my use of the phrase “The Man” however you like)
John Updike gets a lot of shit. Some of that is very deserved. His preoccupation with white male middle-class identity rubs many people the wrong way. The perspective in much…
Reading Log: Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There
My girlfriend picked this up, read it in a day or two, then passed it on to me. I’d never heard of it (or seen the Academy Award-winning movie) and…
Reading Log: John Cavanagh’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn (A 33 1/3 Book)
Yup, more rock journalism. I’m not tired of it yet. Cavanagh sights in perfectly here, focusing on the album itself and only touching on the tumultuous events that followed (the…