Thus far this year I've finished McTeague (Frank Norris, 1899), and begun Mrs. Bridge (Evan S. Connell, 1959). I picked them both up in the free box at the art center, and am/have enjoyed them rather a lot ( Read more... )

Things I have read lately include:

I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (illuminating)
Assassination Vacation (recommended to me by unpleasant. Pretty charming)
Oryx and Crake (pretty firmly up my alley. Except for a couple of tiny things, quite great. Also includes several mentions of Alex the parrot)
Yotsuba ( Read more... )

I've been reading some mass-market kinda stuff lately, which is weird for me (I mean, I could be rereading Dune for the ninth time! Christ!).

Firstly, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was in a box of free books by the side of the road (I also got a medical dictionary from 1937 and a cheesy pre-The-Onion-books satirical book about ( Read more... )

Inconsequential media doings of late include finishing up Zodiac for probably the fifth or sixth time (still good, and amusingly Bostony. I didn't pick it to read for that reason; it was just around, but still it taught me that the Watertown Mall used to have a bar in it. At least I assume it was the Watertown Mall; the Arsenal Mall is also ( Read more... )

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), Sidney Lumet. Jan 1, 3:45 pm. View count: One.

Solaris (2002), Steven Soderbergh. Jan 1, 6:30pm, and Jan 2, 10am with commentary. View count: Two.

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (the first movie we've seen at our local theatre, the Rafael): I am sadly, sadly deficient in Sidney Lumet's work; I ( Read more... )

[Update: askmefi got it in like four seconds. Ordering now ( Read more... )

I just reread Galactic Pot Healer (it'd been... uh, since college?) and unlike the somewhat unsympathetic reviewer at PKDfans (trying to find an inspiring message in a PKD book? Are you quite serious?) found it rather unusually accessible and generally pretty terrific and fun. The thing that it made me want to do, though, was to take the community ( Read more... )

I dunno if this is really John Constantine; looks more like David Bowie to me. It is probably a safe assumption that it is not David Bowie, though.
I just got finished reading a few of the Hellblazer TPBs that I never got around to looking at for whatever reason, and this one was pretty great. The nazi plot was a little eh, but the Bruce-Wayne- ( Read more... )

Yesterday I stopped in the middle of reading an Iain Banks book and instead read the entirety of this book (The Boy Detective Fails). I'd picked it up with the Barnes&Noble gift cert my grandmother gave us (took the relatives long enough to give us such sensical gifts), on the recommendation of Jackson Publick (one of the Venture Brothers guys ( ( Read more... )

From mmcirvin, and the tensor, and madeofmeat, and doctroid.

( Teh Bookmeme! )