The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
My son doesn’t like reading, which is a huge mystery in my house as my wife and I love books and have a house full of them. So it’s always a bit of a struggle finding something for him to read at night. I read Bone by Jeff Smith to him, and he loved it, and he got real into Captain Underpants and a series called Dog Man, both by Dav Pilkey, but I haven’t been able to find anything else to capture his interest. […]
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
I was obsessed with movies in the 2000s. It was that nascent period where people are first discovering themselves. Some use that time productively, some use it to get into trouble. I used it to watch way too many movies. I eagerly awaited the release of Brokeback Mountain. I was a fan of Heath Ledger, but I loved Ang Lee. The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman are two of my favorite movies. I had never read the short story upon which it was […]
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
In 1981, Bruce Springsteen was in talks with Paul Schrader to star in a musical that would, six years later, become Light of Day, and starred Michael J. Fox in one of his first non-comedic roles. The film was originally titled Born in the U.S.A., which Springsteen would use to title a song he’d been working on about a Vietnam veteran. After going through several home demo permutations, it would eventually be the center-point for his 1984 multi-platinum album of the same name, and helped […]
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
I read the prequel to this last year, the unmitigated turd soup called Angles & Demons. I hated the book. The big reveal at the end wasn’t much better than the it was all a dream trope that I tacked on to the end of a short story I wrote in the third grade. Even third grade me realized how trite and predictable it was to pull that out of the hat. Well, Dan Brown returns to tell an equally stupid story about Robert Langdon […]
Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Fingerprints of the Gods (1 star) I’ve always been fascinated by the world of constructed reality, whether it be conspiracy theory or pseduoscience or just general disinformation and propaganda. Fascinated in a “I hate this so much but can’t disengage because I must punish myself for some inexplicable reason” kind of way. When I was in college, I spent an embarrassingly large amount of my free time arguing with young earth creationists on the internet. It so interested me that I wrote my thesis on […]
Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
My wife and I went to our local comic shop several months ago, and this was one of the books she grabbed. I liked the art, she liked it was a story about women, by women. I want to get out of the way right that the outset that the art of Sana Takeda is absolutely beautiful. I mean, that’s immediately obvious from the cover. Beyond that, there was almost nothing about this book that I liked. We start off with Maika Halfwolf, an Arcanic, […]
