review Archives - seanvansickel.com

The Short Stories of Breece D’J Pancake

By seanvansickel January 17, 2016Reading Journal

http://assets.uvamagazine.org/images/uploads/2015/Spring_2015/BreecePancake.jpg Breece D’J Pancake killed himself at 27. Whenever someone who evidences some kind of brilliance kills themselves (or merely meets an untimely end,) it seems difficult to separate the…

Hesse’s “Siddharta”

By seanvansickel August 4, 2015Reading Journal

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…

Reading Log: ‘Barrelhouse 13: Comedy’ or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ephemeral

By seanvansickel May 6, 2015Reading Journal

I have a hard time with pop culture. Specifically, I have a hard time with intellectually rigorous examination of pop culture, because it always seems like too much thought is…

Reading Log: ‘Maus I & II’

By seanvansickel April 11, 2015Reading Journal

Art Spiegelman's two-part graphic novel blends humor and pathos in such a natural way that the reader doesn’t even notice the transitions. Although I’ve read excerpts, I’d somehow managed to…

Reading Log: ‘Thrice Fiction No. 9’, Free Literature, and the Pleasures and Irritations of Finding the Cutting Edge

By seanvansickel April 9, 2015Reading Journal2 Comments

http://www.thricefiction.com/ Thrice Fiction is a free lit mag. They publish some damn good stories, most of which can be defined as short-shorts (...not those kind of short-shorts) or longer flash…

Reading Log: Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Crossing’

By seanvansickel April 8, 2015Reading Journal

Heavy book. I read the last 90 or so pages in a single sitting and after putting it down I felt like I was walking around in a fog, disassociated…

(Aborted) Reading Log: Gone Girl and Why I Need to Give Up on Reading Books That David Fincher Makes Into Movies.

By seanvansickel January 26, 2015Uncategorized

I gave up eighty pages in and skimmed the rest for plot (I always try to make it at least 50 pages in good faith with any novel-length reading endeavor).…

Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors: a semi-cantankerous review

By seanvansickel November 8, 2014Uncategorized2 Comments

I was really disappointed by this book. Granted, I read it immediately following The Pugilist at Rest, and I feel like anything I read next would have seemed a bit…