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…
Category: Literary Liaisons
Wily Wordplay – From Philosophers
And now here are some wise words from people much smarter than myself. 1.“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates 2.“The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures” – Democritus 3.It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows. ~Epictetus 4.The great aim of education is not knowledge but action. -Herbert Spencer 5.“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things” – René Descartes 6.“It is the mark of an…
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…
Wily Wordplay – Insults
Everybody loves a good insult. Here are some of my favorites. 1.“Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.” King Lear, William Shakespeare 2.“The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.” The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde 3.“If you will forgive me for being personal, I do not like your…
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…
In Stores Now-The Feed
As any regular follower of this blog knows I am an avid admirer of both high concept science fiction and post-apocalyptic literature. In The Feed, Nick Clark Windo’s debut novel, I hoped I might find myself a new favorite in these genres that I would enjoy revisiting for years to come. Unfortunately, all I found myself was disappointed. While The Feed is by no means a bad read it is possessed of several flaws that keep it from elevating itself into that can’t miss category of new releases. Let’s start with the plot. The entire world is connected via a…
A Writer’s Tale-Jack Kerouac
Most of my entries here in A Writer’s Tale have a bit of quirkiness about them, if not downright wackiness. But today’s installment is a far more somber affair. It involves a man who is widely held as the greatest American author of his generation, a suspicious death, and a cover-up. Jack Kerouac was sometimes called the “King of the Beatniks”. A complicated fellow he was both anti-communist and a pot enthusiast, staunchly Catholic but heavily associated with the homosexual scene of the time. Living in New York City he fell in with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. These three…
Wily Wordplay- On War
With the specter of war hanging over the Korean Penninsula, it seemed appropriate to share some quotes that are pertinent to the decisions that will need to be made in the months to come. I do not agree with every sentiment expressed here but found these all worthy of discussion. 1.”The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” -Sun Tzu 2. “War does not determine who is right – only who is left.” -Bertrand Russell 3. “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” ― John Steinbeck 4. “I am tired and…
A Writer’s Tale-Jonathon Swift
With it being April Fool’s Day today, I thought I would take this edition of A Writer’s Tale to feature one of the greatest April Fool’s pranks of all time. Our featured author today is that most famous English-Irish satirist Jonathon Swift, most known for his work Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships or as it is more commonly called Gulliver’s Travels. But Swift was no one-hit wonder. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest English language satirists who ever…