I finished reading American Psycho, thank goodness. Extraordinary book but it draws such a vivid picture of its narrator’s psychosis that I felt a little insane reading it ( Read more... )

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Yesterday between my therapists appointment at 1:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. I re-read the novel Less Than Zero (which I first read in high school) in its entirety. I am now extremely depressed. While the drugs, promiscuity, prostitution and snuff films the book touches upon are pretty removed from my life the sense of anxiety and alienation at the ( Read more... )

I originally read Bret Easton Ellis’ novels Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction when I was in high school. I was just a few years younger than the novels anti-protagonists but my life couldn’t have been more different. I found sex and drugs almost impossible to come by and far from being detached and emotionally numb everything mattered a ( Read more... )

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The little one room library in my hometown yielded up a surprisingly rich bounty on my last visit.

I just started reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. It’s a YA novel I heard about on NPR several months ago that has an interesting premise, a sort of fusion of Greek myth and reality TV. There’s a wealthy capital that governs twelve outlying ( Read more... )

The past couple of days have been busy.

Tuesday 01/19/10 was my 38th Birthday.

Because I had quite a few dollars in Barnes and Noble gift cards from “Good-bye to Chicago” and Christmas gifts my Pa-Daddy took me to the nearest Barnes and Noble (an hour and fifteen minutes away in Utica).

While he looked at the antique books and I got a ( Read more... )

A couple of days ago I finished reading Jean Plaidy’s Rose Without a Thorn, a historical novel about Katherine Howard (5th wife of Henry VIII-beheaded) and I’ve just started Cornelia Funke’s Inkdeath, the 3rd and final novel in her Inkworld trilogy. Inkdeath is going to take me a while to read. It’s 663 pages long and even though it’s a young ( Read more... )

I just finished reading Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart.  It was really wonderful.  It’s the story of a twelve year old girl named Meggie whose life with her bookbinder father, Mo, is disrupted when Dustfinger, a charming but untrustworthy figure from her father’s past appears at their house one night with a mysterious warning.  Gradually, Meggie learns ( Read more... )

On Friday I went to an exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum called “American’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City 1800-1900 that spotlighted the Roman themed work of 19th century American Artists. The exhibit included many painting of ruins and the commentary on these featured a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun that I really ( Read more... )