I told you about this book I was excited about reading, right? “The Mystery Guest” by Gregoire Bouillier? I got it in the mail today from Amazon and just read it in one quick go and it’s fantastic, the best thing under 150 pages I’ve read since Pinball, 1973. It’s actually been a while since […]
Category Archives: books
Amazon gift certificates
December 16, 2006 – 12:03 pm
Got some Hanukkah GCs to spend here - what should I get? Here’s how my cart looks so far:
Joy Williams - State of Grace: People swear by this novel
Gregoire Bouillier - The Mystery Guest: I’m dying to read this - vanished ex-girlfriend invites author to be the ‘mystery guest’ at a party ten years since […]
David Foster Wallace - Consider The Lobster
December 2, 2006 – 5:22 pm
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is the DFW book of essays I’d unhesitatingly recommend to a friend; Consider The Lobster is for the more entrenched fan, because the pieces aren’t as interesting, basically. The opening bit about the AVN porn awards in Las Vegas is boring, with flashes of horror about the […]
Bill Buford - Heat
November 29, 2006 – 11:38 am
Heat charts Bill Buford’s journey into the stomach of Italy: former fiction editor for the New Yorker*, he gave up his steady job to slave in the kitchen of Mario Batali’s Babbo, then go to Italy and learn pasta-making and later Tuscan buchery from Dario Cecchini. Buford seems very serious and dedicated about all of […]
I’m going to read and post about those twelve books from the NYT’s 100 best of 2006 list starting with “The Discomfort Zone”
November 28, 2006 – 12:53 am
Franzen got savaged by Michiko Kakutani in the original review of this book and then it gets included in the year-end list: either it was a weak year for non-fiction or the Times is Pitchfork-like in handing out low marks to works it actually likes a whole lot but doesn’t respect.*
Franzen’s exposure of his small, […]
What’s up, Litwack?
September 25, 2006 – 7:14 pm
Sedo.com. I own ten or so domains that need to be parked, and Sedo takes care of it. Ad revs cover my monthly ice cream budget. If you know what I should do with naturalgothic.com, email.
David Allen’s Getting Things Done FAST audiobook. It’s eight hours long and I’m on hour three; it’s inspired me to […]
Total book intensity
April 7, 2006 – 12:12 pm
Yesterday I finished Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself To Live, which I’ll talk about in a second, and am working on the three other books I took out from the library: David Plotz - The Genius Factory, Seth Lloyd Programming The Universe (the details I like in the book so far are not related to quantum […]
April 2, 2006 – 10:53 am
Have I posted this before? I’m thinking of getting one of the tattoos in this book.
I wrote a quick review of Getting Real by 37signals
March 3, 2006 – 11:01 pm
It’s an ebook about web application development process, and my review is here.
The throat of madness
January 11, 2006 – 9:16 am
I got Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo #2 in the mail today and read it. Brunetti has a gift for articulating the fantasies some of us (just me? I don’t know what your inner life is like) drift toward.
Anarchy is free-form fascism. Animals already live in anarchy: they act only by imprinted instinct and follow no written […]
Total filler
January 7, 2006 – 6:52 pm
You know how some Dadaist hit Duchamp’s Fountain with a hammer, again? That’s the world situation for this year: heavy blows cause minor chipping.
I picked up this Benjamin Kunkel Indecision book, read a couple pages and threw it at the wall in disgust. Unfunny and unclever. Maybe I’m being unfair and it improves, but I’m […]