If you could catalog the contents of every undergrad’s bookshelf, White Noise would be among the books you’d find most frequently. Generations of flannel-wearing twenty-somethings have gobbled that shit up. Reading it was almost a rite of passage. There was probably a time when they were giving them…
one The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? And Other Essays Finished: Dec 12, 2022 pp: 290 Author: William Goldman Other books: The Princess Bride , Adventures in the Screen Trade, Which Lie Did I Tell, and more Rating: Breezy Some thoughts: One of the many unfortunate things about the take economy…
I’m just sitting down after a run. My plan this morning was to go for a run, and then sit down to write this. For the past week I’ve been noodling with different pieces of this essay, trying to figure out what to say about running that isn’…
Finished: Dec 5, 2022 pp: 288 Author: Claire Vaye Watkins Other books: Battleborn, Gold Fame Citrus Rating: Really good! Some thoughts: As a rule, I love something that’s overstuffed, shaggy, and rough around the edges. Whether it’s great art is almost secondary. I’ll always prefer the messy…
The Crossing was the first Cormac McCarthy I read. It was in an undergraduate course called “Great Big Books." We also read things like Absalom, Absalom!, Some Other Place, The Right Place, Ceremony, and Geek Love. Complex and often long books about, among other things, what it means to…
There may be spaces that are more traditionally male than the National Football League, but there aren’t many. As with any truly male space, it is full of people who think they’re good at STRATEGY. I live in Washington DC, so I see this all the time in…
Devil House was a slow burn. I talked about my overall reading experience here, and some of the things I mentioned there come to bear on this, but the more time I spend thinking about this book, the more I’m struck by how gradually it reveals its interests. The…
The pandemic sent all of us down content rabbit holes. Before, you might only have enough free time to skim the surface of a subgenre, now you suddenly had the need to fill hours and hours. It’s what led me to watching something like By Dawn's Early…