I have no idea who or what service recommended to me Abby Fabiaschi’s I Liked My Life and Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places. I had them both on hold at the library and both became available at the same time. Both books are also about suicide, so I have been spending a lot of time with the subject over the last 10 days. As someone who lost his father to suicide, I went through the same set of emotions that the principal characters in […]
Patton Oswalt is a Better Comedian than Memoirist
I expected to adore this book. It’s Patton Oswalt — who I love — talking about film, one of my favorite subjects. But it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. Oswalt talks about film a fair amount, but usually as a springboard to talking about himself and his career as an actor and stand-up comedian. When he came to Los Angeles, he became obsessed with the Beverly Movie Theater and saw his frequent visits as a form of education. He began as an aspiring director, […]
About What One Would Expect for a Book Being Adapted Into a Series Starring Luke Evans
This is a re-read, although I wasn’t certain of that at first. The Alienist seemed like a book I might have read in the 1990s, but I had no recollection of it until I started reading it again, and by “reading” it, I mean, listening to the abridged audiobook ahead of TNT series set to debut next week. It wasn’t really until about a quarter of the way through before it really began to register that I’d read it before, and I found it about […]
‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ Is a Brilliant Novel, But Is It Good?
Lincoln in the Bardo is an “experimental novel” that actually took home the 2017 Man Booker Prize, and it really is the kind of book that critics would love. It’s brilliantly written. It’s smart, and funny, and it is full of pathos, and the premise is brilliant: Basically, the book grew out of a story that Saunders heard about how Abraham Lincoln would return to the crypt of his son Willie after he died of typhoid fever to hold the body. The book is primarily […]
The Fairly Fascinating Account of the Most Secluded Hermit in America
My buddy Seth from over on Pajiba got me this book for Christmas, and I have no idea why he’d think I’d be interested in a non-fiction account of a hermit who lived in the woods of Maine for 27 years, other than the fact that I live in Maine. Turns out, however, it’s a pretty fascinating book, and though I do live physically in Maine, I don’t follow the local scene that much, so somehow I managed to know absolutely nothing about Christopher Knight […]
‘Fire and Fury’ Is a Steve Bannon Tell-All Written by Michael Wolff
Over the weekend, I read Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, and if you haven’t read it yet, I would suggest it’s not really worth the time investment if you’ve been keeping up with politics since Donald Trump was elected (that is most of you, I imagine). It essentially recounts Donald Trump’s first year in office, and there’s not a lot in the book we didn’t already know. It’s basically everything that the NYTimes, The Washington Post, Politico, and Axios reported […]