My life was neither created nor destroyed by coal. So much of this book talks about the balance between cost and benefit/harm, but it also spends a lot of time focusing on the industries that built up around coal: iron, transportation, heating/engines. I grew up not in coal country, but adjacent to it in Virginia, where I would see thousands of coal trains over time. The history itself focuses on the development of coal as a fuel source, it’s other more ornamental uses in history, […]
Vocabular Degeneration
Wishful Drinking This is a tough book to read. It’s really funny and really interesting, but you can feel as you’re reading, with it’s repetition, it’s constant reminder that she’s had electroconvulsive therapy, memory loss, years of drug abuse, and all that that she’s just not all there anymore. But, if she weren’t so honest about everything, then it would be unbearable. Instead, there’s just a lower-lying scrim over everything knowing that so much has been lost. Regardless, the book is really funny. I read […]
A Bunch of Stephen King Re-reads
I recently drove to Maine on a road trip. Having read a bunch of Stephen King in my life and driving with someone who’d never read any of his books, I wanted to map the books a little along the path. These particular books were chosen for two main reasons: they’re not “scary” and they were available via Overdrive for the ride. The linking sort of worked out. If you read The Running Man on the way up, you follow the book, and if you […]
So dry
It’s interesting to read proto-Scandinavian murder mysteries. It’s also interesting to read the novels that inspired famous BBC representations of those novels. This is an early crime novel in the sense of crime novels being about the violence, and the world around that violence, and the world that created that violence. There’s an introduction to this novel written by Henning Mankell, who is as famous as could be in the world of Nordic crimes novels, and he talks about this being a novel about details, […]
Wow, this brings back some stuff
When I was in high school, the Neil Jordan version of The End of the Affair came out at the local arthouse theater. I think I had already watched a bunch of his movies or this one set me on a tear of watching Michael Collins, The Crying Game, and others I could get my hand on. In addition, I remember watching this and immediately becoming infatuated with Graham Greene and reading a handful of his books, including this one. I re-listened to this one, read by Colin Firth, […]
The Road redux
I read this novel when it first came out in 2006 or so. I was teaching for my first year in Baltimore and I read this novel is my bare-ass room in a basement apartment in Baltimore. I had recently read and reviewed No Country for Old Men, and so the spare details of the novel and it’s subject was a lot to take. This time around I listened to the audiobook while I cleaned out my gross ass basement. Like super gross. Bugs. Spidewebs. Muck. […]
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