Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, dead at the age of 47 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart.
This is terribly sad news. It’s A Wonderful Life is still one of my favorite albums and it will never be the same for me in light of this horrible tragedy.
Breaktime will soon be over.
Much of my spare time in 2009 was taken up by trying to complete the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge I set for myself. A couple of times, I almost quit the challenge. I had attempted it once before, a few years ago, and got to about 12 books before giving up. For me, it’s a tough challenge, since I drift towards the encyclopedic novels of writers like Pynchon or Vollmann. I knew it was a misstep, but I tried to tackle David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest midway through my quest. Halfway through that book, the need to see my quest to the end and get back on track took over. I found myself reading things I wouldn’t necessarily read, just to hit a number. This year, there will be no 52 book quest. I’ll let my natural urges take over again. I have a taste for the maximal, and this is where I will go. I intened on re-reading some old favorites for the first time in many years. A few weeks ago, I gifted a spare copy of William T. Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows to a co-worker. It’s my favorite book, and I intend to revisit it. And I’ve had a copy of Vollmann’s 1400 page Imperial sitting here for months. It will be lonely no more. I wanted to tackle Bolano’s 2666 this past year, but after 30 pages or so, I thought that I might want to read The Savage Detectives first. And thus, I have begun there. Happy readings…..
I’ve decided to lump the lat 9 books of my quest to read 52 books in a year together because they are all tied together. At times, I didn’t think I would be able to complete this quest, especially after spending a month with Infinite Jest this past summer and only getting halfway through (I do plan to get back to it). But here on New Year’s Eve at 9:15 pm I finished book 52, volume 9 of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher
Yet another release from Hard Case Crime, Branded Woman
Donald Westlake died a year ago today. He was peripherally on my radar (I often see book collectors looking for his harder to find novels written under the pseudonym Richard Stark). When he died, I took even more notice as all the tributes from people i respect started rolling out. Hard Case Crime’s reissue of 361
Yet another selection from Hard Case Crime…The Vengeful Virgin
Lydia Millet is an author more people should be familiar with. Her latest book,Love in Infant Monkeys
I’ve had mixed success with the Hard Case Crime titles I’ve read. Fortunately, Richard Powell’s Say It With Bullets
The Colorado Kid
The Colorado Kid opens with a writer from The Boston Globe meeting with two small town Maine newspaperman and thier intern. He is looking for unslved mystery stories for a piece in the Globe. While they don’t share anything with the writer from the Globe, the two men do share the story with their intern later in the day. Unfortunately, the tale they tell of a body found on the island that couldn’t be identified, is ultimately very boring and tedious. Worse yet is King’s insistence at trying to capture the local witticisms and vernacular of Maine. It’s not just distracting, it’s annoying. Avoid at all costs.
Bust
When I started reading The Max
At long last, Amazon has a listing for the new David Mitchell novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet:
, Cloud Atlas
Exit Music
More from the Hard Case Crime series….Grave Descend
I picked up a huge stack og these Hard Case Crime books early this year for two reasons. One, I wanted to start reading some pulp. The second is that I couldn’t resist the covers. Max Allan Collins The Last Quarry
The Last Quarry has obviously been a hit for Collins and Hard Case because he has since written The First Quarry and Quarry In The Middle, both of which I’ll be keeping my eye out for.
The Naming of the Dead
It’s not much of a surprise that Rankin isn’t a more popular writer in the United States than he is. He is definitely too cerebral for most American sensibilities. Works like this transcend mere genre fiction and are truly works of art. Just one more Rebus to go…
Jerry Remy’s Watching Baseball
I pretty much checked out of the comic book scene in the early 90’s. This owes as much to Rob Leifeld’s inexplicable success during that decade and the absurd glut of mutant “X” titles as it does to my adolescent discovery of “real” literature.
This is too bad for me, because I missed out on some great stuff back then. I’ve started to play catch up thanks to collected trade paperbacks, most recently Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s brilliant Preacher series.
To briefly summarize the plot, a celestial accident occurs in Heaven, which wipes out small town Texas preacher Jesse Custer’s entire parish and grants him some serious powers thanks to an immature, yet supremely powerful, being called Genesis which inhabits him and grants him the Word, i.e. a power that allows him to make anyone do anything he says whenever he feels like it.
With his newfound power, his gal Tulip, and an Irish vampire named Cassidy, Jesse decides to track down God, who has checked out of the day-to-day oversight of His creation, get face to face with him, and hold him accountable for all the evils of the world.
What ensues is terrific drama, action, violence, gore, hilarity, and a cast of characters that includes God, the Devil, inbred hillbillies, the ultimate badass Saint of Killers, a pathetic Kurt Cobain wannabe who goes by the name “Arseface”, and John fucking Wayne.
I can’t recommend this book enough.
Incidentally, while reading it I thought to myself “what an amazing cable series this would make”. Sure enough, it was in development for HBO a few years ago, but was ultimately scrapped. Too bad, because the Arseface makeup tests are tremendous:
Fleshmarket Alley
