Currently Browsing: News
Mar 29, 2011
#2 ACTUAL AIR by David Berman
Sometimes circumstances in life seem determined to push books on us. From late 2009 to 2010 David Berman was dogging me at every turn. I had never listened to much Silver Jews, but finally that winter I fell into a sort of love with American Water, and the rest of the albums fell into place. Then I started noticing ACTUAL AIR on different book shelves throughout the country. My travels kept taking me to... read more
Feb 15, 2011
#3 BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY by Jay McInerney
I’m thinking back to the fall of 2003. I was living in Missoula, Montana, setting myself on a course of self-destruction with drugs and drink, directionless, lost in a new city and losing sight of whatever ambitions had led me there. It was not a big city, Missoula, and the lights were not terribly bright. You could see the stars there just fine. But anyway there were moments in the course of reading... read more
Feb 15, 2011
#4 A CONFEDERATE GENERAL FROM BIG SUR by Richard Brautigan
I cannot hope to explain how I managed to live nearly thirty-one years without reading a single book by Richard Brautigan. I’ve been intending to for years, have had him recommended to me time and time again from all sorts of readers, classy middle-aged South African librarians to young hip English scriblers. One of these days, I kept telling myself, and Brautigan kept sitting patiently on my virtual... read more
Feb 8, 2011
# 5 THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pynchon
In 2009 I read Pynchon’s Inherent Vice while in the midst of Gravity’s Rainbow, and it seemed at times like they were written by two different authors, the newer book breezier and maybe grounded more in a recognizable reality, but lacking the brilliance and emotional heft of Pynchon’s magnum opus. The Crying of Lot 49, written before the others, helped bridge the gap in my mind between the two. The... read more
Jan 29, 2011
#6 THE 42ND PARALLEL / NINETEEN NINETEEN by John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos is a name shrouded by layers of dust in the annals of American Literature, the name of a man highly regarded in his time but subsequently overlooked. I never heard the name uttered by any instructors through my too many years of school, not that I can remember. The first time I saw one of his books might have been deep in the stacks of my college’s library, but I had never met anyone who... read more
