What I've been doing

Alright, in the last month that I haven't been posting I've been finishing up some reading.
What that has to do with anything is up in the air.

On the Road: Revelatory for the first third, then the author tries to paint the main character as a scumbag. Some all too brief redemption at the end, but there's a point when you have to say Hey Jack Keroauc! Dean is lost, he won't grow up, we get it!

Mother Night: I'm starting to realize that all Vonnegut novels are exactly the same. At least the book doesn't get bogged down in characters like Breakfast of Champions, and the novel makes some great points about death and choice and book publishing.


Garlic And Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise: There's a awestruck way that this New York Times food critic talks about food, and learning about life on the inside of the New York Times was a fun, witty and ultimately insubstantial ride. The author's attempts to make the book heftier by emphasizing a case of cancer struck me as superfluous and vulgar.

Lolita: This book will make you fall in love with the English language all over again. Also puns. You will learn to love literary puns. With over 160 pages of meta-textual material, since unlike Vonnegut, Nabokov seems to have the discipline to lurk in the texture but not in the text.

Lullaby: A very cinematic book spliced with a series of parables. The ending seems rushed, and the flash forwards seem tacked on, and half of the weaksauce McGuffin plot would have been averted had the alleged hot-shot Sherlock Holmes journalist been able to pay attention to a certain book he was investigating. Read it on the plane from MSP to SeaTac.

There, between Kerouac and Nabokov and Vonnegut, I think my writing my be ruined forever. Goodbye to AP Style. Next up: the collected works of e.e. cummings