I don’t recall exactly how old I was the first time I read A Christmas Carol, but I was in grade school, and I knew enough to know that this Dickens fellow was an author adults read. Still, the volume was thin enough to be un-intimidating, and the illustrations were friendly, so I checked it out of the library (with the encouragement of the local librarian, I should say!). I remember being a bit taken aback when Dickens spent the better part of the first […]
Religion, Identity, and Flossing
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a story of contradictions, which perhaps explains why I’ve been having trouble getting started on this review. I liked this novel, but I’m sort of at a loss to explain what I liked about it. Maybe it’s the darkly comic tone of the novel, or the interplay of characters. But mostly I think it’s because it raises a bunch of philosophical questions that it doesn’t really ever answer, and I’m a sucker for that. (Note, if that […]
Tough Guys, Tough Talk, and Treasure
I’m a fan of film noir. For my money, it doesn’t get much better than Fred MacMurray “Hey, Baby”-ing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Humphrey Bogart talking tough in The Maltese Falcon. But even though I’m a fan of the detective film and I love to read, I had yet to pick up anything by Dashiell Hammett, the master of the hard-boiled detective novel. Time to remedy that, I decided. The Maltese Falcon is the story of archetypal detective Sam Spade who, along with […]
Marketing Genius or Load of Rich Creamery Butter?
Have you ever been talking with a group of friends and the subject of marketing comes up? Inevitably, at least one person will make the claim that marketing “doesn’t work” on him. I suppose this claim goes along with having a great sense of humor and impeccable taste as the most common delusions of the human species. I’ve just never understood why people make it a point of pride to claim that they are impervious to marketing efforts, as if that makes a person smarter […]
Amusing, but not the Moore I’d recommend for first-time readers
I’m kind of all over the place in the world of Christopher Moore. He’s published fourteen novels to date, and as of a month ago I had read twelve of them. But for some reason I’m just now getting to Coyote Blue, Moore’s second published novel. Coyote Blue tells the story of Sam Hunter, a confident insurance salesman in California who, on the surface, has everything he could want. He’s a successful salesman precisely because he is able to adapt his persona to whatever would […]
Troubling on so many levels
I’ve read Gillian Flynn’s body of work in reverse. I first became aware of her when everyone was reading Gone Girl, so I jumped on the bandwagon and tore through that novel like the suspenseful page-turner that it is. Next I read Dark Places, and in some ways I liked it even more, with its dark, In Cold Blood feel, though at times I felt like Flynn piled on the disfunction a bit too heavily. “How much more can this family go through?” I remember […]