“We know more about what Huey Long represented and the emptiness at the core of American political culture from reading Robert Penn Warren than from contemporary journalistic accounts of Long’s reign. We know more about human pride, purpose, and obsession from Moby-Dick than from any contemporaneous account of the Nantucket whaler that was actually struck …
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, …
“He’s been counting on this one last shift for so long, as if it might hold some final answer. It can’t, he knows, yet he feels threatened by the idea of loosing his last chance.” - Stewart O’Nan For me this book perfectly captures that feeling of your last day at a job you sort …
It’s rare that I read a book that I don’t like. Even the ones I’m not terribly fond of I can still find nice things to say about. Which is rather opposite from the way I feel about people, actually. Even so looking back through a list of books I read this past year, of …
I saw GwenBell’s Best of 09 Blog Challenge on Lit-Wit yesterday and I immediately wanted to play along. But I was knee-deep in a paper due this afternoon. So, I’m going to try and do as many of these possible, but I’ll probably end up playing catch up when I finish end of the semester …
