Every few months I take a weekend and attend a writer’s conference. These conferences almost always have swag bags filled with the goodies we authors appreciate most books and pens. These backpacks full of books are often filled with works that are not up my particular alley. (So much romance, so little interest.) I was pleasantly surprised when in one of these swag bags I found I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Iain Reid’s debut novel, amongst my freebies. The novel came highly praised and I placed it on my to-read shelf with great excitement and anticipation. Time passed, life…
Category: On the Shelf
On The Shelf- Noir
This month’s On the Shelf entry is another product of a conference swag bag and it combines three of my favorite things the Noir genre, satire, and the city of San Francisco. I have to say, in my entire life rarely have I come across a book that so wildly altered my perception of it as I read. I began reading with great excitement, became bored and disinterested, then finally became enthralled as I finished one of my most enjoyable reads in a long while. I hope you’ll go on this madcap zany adventure with me as I discuss Christopher…
On the Shelf- Cat’s Cradle
Any list of American literary masters would be incomplete without Kurt Vonnegut. Known for prose that was simultaneously absurd and deadly serious, Vonnegut was deeply affected by his experiences as a soldier in World War II. More specifically, he was psychologically scarred by his survival of the bombing of Dresden, one of the most horrific events in a war full of horrific events. He would write about this experience in some of his non-fiction essays and in his seminal work Slaughterhouse-Five. But before Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut truly found his voice in his fourth novel Cat’s Cradle; which is the subject of…
On The Shelf- Mycroft Holmes
Since his invention by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has dominated the public square. Whether the medium be the printed page, the stage, radio, or screens large and small; not a year goes by without some new iteration of the world’s most famous detective entering the canon. With such an endless stream of adaptations and reinterpretations, it comes as a pleasant surprise when something comes along to pique my interest. I hope you feel the same way because in this edition of On the Shelf I discuss a rather inventive take on the Sherlock Holmes legend, Mycroft…
On The Shelf- Good Omens
With a new, live-action adaptation premiering this week, I thought it was a good time to dust off my copy of Good Omens and give it another read. Then I realized I loaned out my copy some time ago and never got it back. Luckily, I travel a good deal and the book is currently a ubiquitous feature of airport newsstands. For those of you not already familiar with Good Omens, the novel is a product of a partnership between Neil Gaiman and the late, great Terry Pratchett. A satirical take on the End Times, the novel follows the angel…
On the Shelf- All the Sad, Young, Literary Men
For this edition of On the Shelf I decided to go to a book that has literally sat on my shelf for a few years without having been read: Keith Giessen’s All the Sad, Young, Literary Men. I picked it up on a whim because the title intrigued me (it’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald reference) and it’s possible I never started it because I was afraid the title described me. But in the end, my belief that no book on my shelf should ever go unread won out and I decided to make a concerted effort to finish this potential…
On The Shelf- In The Woods
I love a good whodunit. My bread and butter may lay more with fiction of the speculative variety, but at my core, I’m a puzzle solver. I want to put together the clues and see if I can’t figure it all out before the plot reaches the denouement. Unfortunately, I have consumed so much media over the years that I’ve become intimately familiar with all of the conventions of the mystery genre. As a result, some of the subtler breadcrumbs writers leave along the way for their readers instead read like big neon signs for me. I felt this was…
On The Shelf- Survivor
Sex. Violence. Consumerism. These are the three key components of any Chuck Palahniuk novel and this month’s entry of On The Shelf is no exception. In this iteration, we get a doomsday cult, a marketing messiah, and a woman who knows literally everything. So come with me as I dive deep into the bibliography of the man who brought you Fight Club and Choke and review one of his lesser-known works, Survivor. This is Palahniuk’s second novel, following three years after Fight Club. In it, Tender Branson is the last known survivor of a doomsday cult and after being approached…
On The Shelf- Moon Palace
Have you ever been fifty pages into a novel an thought to yourself “man this book is exquisitely written…….and I kind of hate it”? That’s where I found myself while reading Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, which is the subject of this edition of On The Shelf. Now, I’m normally a big fan of Paul Auster. The only reason you won’t find multiple copies of The New York Trilogy and Travels in the Scriptorium on my bookshelf is that every time I buy a copy of one of those books I immediately lend it out to a friend and never see…
On The Shelf- The Road
Sometimes our title On the Shelf means a book that’s been out a while that I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten around to it yet and sometimes the books we look at have literally been on my shelf for years. The Road is a novel that falls into the latter category. Cormack McCarthy’s novel about a father and son trying to survive as they journey across a post-apocalyptic America is a poetic meditation on the things that drive us forward in life. What is the point of living when every day is a struggle to survive? When there…