The Lady in the Lake, Chandler’s fourth Philip Marlowe novel, gets the private eye out of 1940s Los Angeles and into the California countryside. You would think the hard-boiled detective is just looking for a little TLC after all the murders and blackjacks to the skull, but that’s not his style. Just look at the title! Trouble seems to follow Marlowe like a hangover fart. This is a different kind of Marlowe novel, in my opinion. The previous books featured a more sardonic, cosmopolitan, up-for-anything […]
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
This book sat on my shelf for a decade because I was too scared to read it. It’s great, everyone said. It’s great, but it’s heavy. It is both of those things. It’s also, unexpectedly, the best book on fatherhood I’ve ever read. More on that later. Plotwise, The Road is not paving (haha) any new terrain: An apocalyptic event occurred within the last decade, and the survivors are trying to eke out an existence. The main threat isn’t the scarred earth – it’s the other […]
Fun Trivia, Including Why We Say “Jock Strap” and “Beef”
I recently reviewed a book about how the 178 printed miles of the Oxford English Dictionary was created. Concurrent with that book, I was also listening to Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. While I wouldn’t say that one book was better than the other, I will say that if i had to pick only one, I’d pick this one. The wider scope of Bryson’s book gives you a little bit of everything – swear words, where names from come (think about “Goldwater” for a second), why kids’ […]
The Oxford English Dictionary Was Basically Wikipedia
Fans of Comedy Central’s tv show “Drunk History” may be familiar with the story of Dr. William Minor: The Civil War doctor showed signs of struggling with mental health during and after the war (how could one not), and moved to London for a fresh start. Unfortunately, Dr. Minor suffered from the beliefs that all kinds of people were out to get him, and those beliefs led him to shoot an innocent stranger in cold blood. The American was institutionalized. Concurrently, Professor James Murray was […]
Believe the Enneagram Hype
I was skeptical about this book for two reason. When something is trendy, like the Enneagram, I hate it by default. (The first version of this book, to be fair, was from the 1980s.) I’ve also done a lot of introspective exercises in the last few years, and at this point I’m a bit skeptical of more of it.The reason is, at some point I think you have to focus less on yourself and more on the rest of the cosmos. I was mentally primed […]
A Collection of Entertaining Postmodern “Mystery” Novel(s).
I stumbled onto this book because I was chatting up an acquaintance and I mentioned I was into hard-boiled mysteries. He said, “Oh, you might like The New York Trilogy“. In retrospect, that’s like saying, “Oh, you like the show Friends? You might also like the movie Requiem for a Dream. It also has stuff about friends and family dynamics!” This is…different than what I had in mind. The only other way to talk about this book is to talk about talking about this book. […]
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