by Joan Thomas One problem with overanalyzing everything, as I tend to do, is that deeper meanings aren’t always readily apparent after a single reading. In the example of The Opening Sky, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the heavy-handed environmentalist preaching that suddenly appears partway in. Was this merely a measure of…
Read more
by Allen Ginsberg While I’ve spent a great deal of time sampling the likes of great Beat prose, I hadn’t really encountered any of the poetry, unless you want to count tiny snippets included in The Dharma Bums. As such, I figured Howl and Other Poems was probably the place to start; I was most…
Read more
by Hunter S. Thompson This was actually my third time reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in its entirety. When I first made my way through it, I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever read, so it’s become one of those things I revisit from time to time, for a…
Read more
by Amy Jones I should really start this review off with a confession: I didn’t find We’re All in This Together particularly funny, despite my copy of the book telling me that I should, but that’s probably just a measure of being unable to easily fit joy into my hardened heart. It seems that I…
Read more
by Art Spiegelman I was a bit concerned when Maus II began with a big text dump in which Spiegelman expresses his apprehensions going into the project, along with inadequacies he felt growing up. Of course, this soon enough makes way to his father, Vladek, up to his old miserly shenanigans again, and I could…
Read more
by Art Spiegelman Man, first Ablutions and then this; I really don’t know what I was thinking. I need to read something light and happy next, to help wash this wave of despair away. (Save me, Wodehouse!) Though, to be perfectly honest, I’ll probably be reading the second instalment of Maus immediately after this one,…
Read more
by Patrick deWitt Well, this one was a doozy. I really don’t know what I was expecting going into this book, but, after reading The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor, it sure caught me by surprise. And I kind of wish I was a bit prepared for a story as depressing as Ablutions turned out…
Read more
by Michael Christie It’s hard to write a good plot twist. It feels a bit odd to be talking about this again so soon, but it seems like an important thing to discuss with regards to Christie’s book. If you give away too much information, a careful reader will catch wind of it long before…
Read more
by H. Leighton Dickson It’s rare for a story to really stop me in my tracks early on but, with Cold Stone and Ivy, Dickson did something that I was beginning to think I’d never see outside a Kurt Vonnegut story, and she did it in a way that was utterly foreign to me. You…
Read more
by Gore Vidal Where to begin with this one? It’s not even that I have a hard time expressing my opinion of Duluth––it’s really good––but I find it difficult to explain why I found Vidal’s surrealist satire as enjoyable as I did. And, even though I walked away with such respect for the story and…
Read more