teaching my newborn humility with WHAT ABOUT BOB? "This movie was here before you, and will be around long after you've gone." # 
Feeling adventurous and replacing Windows with Ubuntu on an old computer.
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26 years old, live in the rural northwest of Sullivan County, N.Y., though a native of the South. Obsessed with genealogy and (Not unrelated) Confederate Apologetics. Published in Ellery Queen, had a book out you never heard of, now earning a living playing with computers (Design, tech, etc…).
Oil! |
Finished: February 1st, 2012
Took me a shamefully long time to get this book read… A lot of work and upheaval. But I stuck to it! Ultimately sort of indifferent toward it. A bit meandering at times, with day to day adventures of the main character not always (in my opinion) contributing anything. Having fairly recently moved to a rural county populated by dirt-poor rednecks as well as affluent second homeowners, I’ve found myself with some worrisome burgeoning socialist leanings, and this book certainly didn’t help. Still relevant, despite being 90 years old, in terms of corporations and rich and poor. OIL! has had a renewed interest in the last few years (my own included) due to it being credited as the basis for the movie THERE WILL BE BLOOD. The similarities are incredibly few and far between. People looking for the movie’s novelization stand to be disappointed.
Discussion (0)
The Traitor |
Finished: March 20th, 2011
I read THE KLANSMAN a year or two ago and enjoyed getting to see such an unspoken perspective on the Reconstruction Era in the South. THE TRAITOR is a sequel to the book and offered the same. While it is obviously profoundly biased, it shows what was obviously the viewpoint of Southerners following their defeat in their War for Independence.
While THE KLANSMAN showed the formation of the Ku Klux Klan as some noble band of vigilantes fighting against the lawless rule of the occupying army, THE TRAITOR shows the end of its usefulness and subsequent disbanding, and follows a melodramatic romance of what happens when local good-for-nothings continue to operate as Klansman, but only as a cover for committing petty crimes.
It’s a maudlin and silly book, but worth reading for historical purposes.
As what must be one of the only unabashed defenses of a universally despised organization, but one which once held the sympathies of so much of the country for so long, this series is certainly worth reading.
Discussion (0)
A Feast of Snakes |
Finished: February 12th, 2011
I was at a dinner this past summer and a girl named this book when I asked if she had a favorite. I looked it up the next day, saw the author had a documentary made about him and had some sort of cult following, and mostly since he was a Georgian, I was intrigued. On my lunch break (This was in the midst of the bad old days of commuting three hours each way to work in Manhattan), I ran down to the Union Square Barnes and Noble to see if they had it. The girl who’d mentioned it had invited the wife and I to a party the following month and I thought it would be nice if I could tell her I’d read the book she’d mentioned. But B&N didn’t have it. And money was tight, so I took it as a sign and felt some measure of relief to leave the book store with the same amount of money as I’d gone in with.
Fast-forward seven months to these glory days of a job that’s not three hours away (Not even three minutes!) and I was in the main drag of my little town and ran into a buddy who was looking to offload a duffel bag full of books. Since I work at the library and we constantly accept donations, I took him down the road and we walked in and unpacked the books. Several he said he wanted to give to me so I could read them (The well-known AMERICAN PSYCHO, as well as ones I’d never heard of, THE FORGOTTEN HERO OF MY LAI: THE HUGH THOMPSON STORY, and SURVIVING HITLER, sitting now on my study’s reading table). And there, among the books, is A FEAST OF SNAKES.
Intrigued that two people in a tiny town should have both read the same not-very-well-known (I think) book, I grabbed it and took it home with the others.
Isn’t that a neat little story?
You know what isn’t so much?
Harry Crews’ A FEAST OF SNAKES.
It’s a nice, tight little book, and it was engaging and pulled me in and I enjoyed reading it. It leaned toward vulgarity but was never overly sensational, and I respected the restraint. I was open to liking it until the last two pages, when it took a turn toward the sort of grimey, hardcore, pseudo-literary unflinchingness that punk middle-schoolers tend to fawn over. Ultimately, it threw out too many lines of metaphor and never pulled anything very weighty in.
But, as always, this is just my opinion. Two friends dug it, and Joseph Heller raves about it on the front cover. And he wrote a good book once, before he wrote a bunch of others.
Discussion (1)
The World According to Garp |
Finished: January 29th, 2011
Like alot of books I like (For some reason, James Hilton and Richard Russo come immediately to mind), Garp, despite extraordinary events, creates a believably mundane world which is enjoyable to follow. But in the final reckoning, I don’t think there’s anything that will ever stand out in my memory. So: enjoyable throughout, but unsatisfying in the end. My only real qualm is that the book excerpts fiction written by the titular character at length, which I think put it at a disadvantage. In particular, a short story which Garp writes, and is shared in full, is later referred to repeatedly for its greatness. As so much of the book rests on believing in Garp’s greatness as a writer, it would have worked better if I hadn’t read the whole short story which is the pinnacle of his career, particularly as I though it was pretty bad… Looking forward to reading a shorter, more succinct book next.
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Amsterdam |
Finished: January 11th, 2011
Impressively, staggeringly, masterfully, bafflingly terrible. The first two thirds are very well done. You’re obviously in the hands of a master. But then… I don’t want to give away the ending, but I can’t imagine any greater insult than to wonder whether it’s an elaborate prank. I can’t imagine the author was serious. A friend who adores McEwan loaned me this. I saw him speak once at the 92nd Street YMCA in Manhattan at the time of ON CHESIL BEACH. And I read that and thought it was great, but more just a short story than anything else. I know ATONEMENT’s pretty widely hailed as super-duper, but I have a hard time seeing myself reading any of his other stuff. He just seems like an incredible novelist who is unfortunately a fourth-rate storyteller.
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The Heart of the Matter |
Finished: January 9th, 2011
An early-ish effort from my favorite author. He’d written plenty of adventures prior to this, but here is one of his earliest efforts to write the sort of book that defined him. A bit more exposition than later Greene novels require to introduce characters, relationships, and most importantly, moods. And then the final, inevitable tragedy of Greene’s best work is here, but in a not-yet-perfected form. A bit more heavy-handed and less inescapable and believable than he his later stuff. But still a grand, engaging work.
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The Education of a Turkey Hunter |
Finished: November 13th, 2010
Having moved up to New York State, and a hamlet–in fact–named after the Dutch word for “Wild Turkey”, I was very eager to get out after some wild turkey during the Fall hunting season. I didn’t know any turkey hunters, and while the internet gave me–I thought–the basics, I wanted something more thorough and authoritative. So I checked out the one book they had on it at the local library. This one! And then read it more or less in one setting. While my subsequent turkey hunts yielded nothing, I really felt like the book taught me more than I could possibly want to know. And the format was an enjoyable homespun memoir, recounting the life of a man from a farm in Appomattox County Virginia. The memoir itself, the guide to turkey hunting, and the record of development of turkey evolution and government hunting oversight from the early to latter 20th Century would each stand on their own as a good book, but the quick-and-easy-to-read combination of the three make it one anybody with the least interest in the subject ought to read.
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The Maltese Falcon |
Finished: October 15th, 2010
I’ll write about The Maltese Falcon later… it’s like the movie.
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