A tightly themed, well executed collection: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse captures our apocalypse fears and fantasies equally well and sometimes even simultaneously. Adams wisely chooses Stephen King’s “The End of the Whole Mess” as an opener and moves into all manner of exciting territory from there. Wastelands is the expected mix of strong (and […]
Two worthy combinations from last month: Oryx and Crake: a psychoanalytic read: her, amputated Repetition is a form of change; who said that? zombie phobia “Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the […]
WARNING: elements of my review may be interpreted as spoilers. Proceed with caution. FIRSTLY: If the entirety of Ghostwritten had bristled with the same energy and momentum as the bottom half of the book (i.e., from “Holy Mountain” through to “Night Train”) then my review here would bristle with five stars. That said, I also […]
I don’t really remember how this one popped on my radar. An Amazon.com “plog” entry? Recommendation? GoodReads stream? All of those? Something else? Anyway, Jeremy Shipp’s Vacation popped up sometime late last year and it made it onto my to-read list. I’m positive that if my local library had it, I’d have read it already […]
Having never before read any H.P. Lovecraft, I held a deeply geeky shame. This was an author that was supposed to have helped define modern horror, helped define weird fiction and the truly-out-there sci-fi. The “Cthulhu Mythos” was something that I referenced frequently and yet ignorantly. All this time it was as if I had […]
Waiting for dinner to cook… Smells good, can’t wait. Caught P.’s latest Twitter shortly after I got home and had this weird moment of synchronicity. See, I stopped off at the library on my way home and while browsing the available volumes of Dick, Delaney, and Lovecraft (none of which piqued) I noticed that they […]
If asked to condense it to a single sentence, I would say that in essence, Galatea 2.2 is Richard Powers’ novelization 1 of the ideas laid out in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. That said, I’m uncertain how to respond to this one. After reaching the last page and closing the covers, it left me feeling […]
Argh. This book was maddening. Coming off the heels of Generation X and Microserfs, I suppose my expectations were pretty high but this really felt like the literary equivalent of bottoming out. With All Families are Psychotic: A Novel, Coupland thrusts us into this absurdly over-the-top comically dismal present tense-ish Florida that just doesn’t ever […]
If Microserfs were a Jeopardy contestant, its dream board would be: Nerd vs. Geek Literary Encryption Techniques Esoteric Double Entendres Silicon Valley: Then & Now Material and/or Mental The Body Sucks? NOTE TO SELF: Do not read this book again as long as I’m still working in software.
The book you hate to love? Or love to hate? It’s no wonder Coupland saw literary success after this book. It really smells like a triumph on all the scales that authors and their critics measure each other. It has many devilishly clever moments, it is rife with scythe-like word-play, the plot is well-paced, the […]