Needful Things by Stephen King
This is the last of the Stephen King novels that came out when I was a kid. I think the ones that I haven’t read yet past this one, I was at least in college for, and will get to those eventually. But I specifically remember my older brother going out and getting this one, and bringing it home, and the large hardback book, with the dark cover with the shop window lighted on it. It’s also a movie we watched together, but I hadn’t […]
The New Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West
This is a revised edition of a book that came out not that long after WWII had ended and was revisited about 20 years later when the geopolitical situation surrounding the concept of treason further shifted from the politics of fascism and democracy to one of the Cold War logic of communism and democracy (and I know that communism is an economic system, but meaning here the authoritarian governments under communist regimes in Soviet Union, and within time China and North Korea, although the book […]
Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich
This is collage book (kind of, maybe) from the Belorussian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. This is the first of her works I’ve read, but I think it’s more or less representative of the kinds of work she does across different subject fields. In this book, she is collecting and editing small scenes of witness of WWII (The Great Patriotic War) by adults in the middle age, remembering their experiences from when they were children. The main range of these pieces are 1-3 pages, but there’s […]
Neon Rain by James Lee Burke
This is the first novel in the Dave Robichaux mystery series by James Lee Burke. I don’t know anything about subsequent novels, except that there is a lot of them, and for me, this amazing Onion article that makes me feel seen in a way like no other: https://www.theonion.com/audiobook-narrator-really-going-for-broke-with-cajun-ac-1821950450 Anyway, Dave Robichaux is a New Orleans police detective and Vietnam vet looking into the case of a dead sex worker who is found floating in a bayou. There’s conflict between her death being ruled as […]
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
This is the novel of the tv show from HBO. I am watching the show now and there’s a lot in the show that I think the novel might have been improved had it contained some of the different choices, but also, I think the novel captures some things much better. So the plot here is that about 1-2 percent of the world population disappears in what appears to be the Rapture. It’s called the Rapture, but there’s no clear consensus about whether that’s an […]
The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe
This is the final book of the main series of the Book of the New Sun, as told in this volume and three others. Like the previous ones, this one is presented as a kind of found-text in a foreign language and translated by Gene Wolfe. That framing device works as far as you’re not too interested in how a book that supposedly takes place 1,000,000 years into the Earth’s future is found and translated by a contemporary writer. Maybe like a timeloop or something. […]
