kurtwombat's reviews
890 reviews

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman

4.0

This is my first reading of anything by Chuck Klosterman and for the most part I enjoyed it. He displays his vast knowledge of pop culture in ways that amuse, sometimes going for more laughs than others. Whatever he gloats over (Saved By The Bell, Mr. Kellogg, Axl Rose & more) he breaks down in inventive ways to reveal the mechanics of their power. My favorite essay involved his hanging out with a Gun’s N’ Roses cover band, pointing out the silliness of their dream but nicely managing never to make fun of it. Thankfully he admits to not being above the pull of pop culture otherwise the reader would have had the taste of a lie on their tongues essay after essay. I disagreed as much as I agreed with his conclusions but he made his points well enough that I could live with it. Personal tastes have to be lived with and can be as long as there is reciprocation. Sometimes the hipster veneer covers us all—that gloss of pretentious self importance composed of pop culture touchstones and being part of an advertisers favorite demographics—but it gets thinner the more you open your eyes. Youth and the misapplication of importance often go hand in hand. Some essays didn’t seem complete—specifically his take on breakfast cereals and his take on the Lakers/Celtics rivalry but on the whole the essays and their sharp introductions will provoke some laughs and thoughts. I’d be curious to read more…but I am not running out right this minute to find it.

The Golem's Mighty Swing by James Sturm

4.0

THE GOLEM’S MIGHTY SWING snuck up on me. Despite being aware of some glowing reviews before my reading of the story, my expectations were subdued--I could not imagine that something so spare with its dialogue and relatively few frames for its hundred pages could wield such power. As I read though I began to feel the slights suffered by the almost all Jewish baseball team barnstorming 1920s America. Despite baseball’s laconic nature, the turns of fortune are usually sudden and thus hitting with all the more power. So it is for these characters. Race and religion should not impact the rules of baseball but they do. They should have no place on a ball field, but are carried onto it every time cleats cross the chalk lines. I felt the smooth wood of a bat and the rough hewn benches of the visitor’s dugout—Blacks and Jews are often still in the visitor’s dugout. Each character is indelible after just a few words so you have little choice but to feel what they feel. All of this sharpened the disappointment I felt at the conclusion. While I understood that realistically the final game couldn’t be completed, we are waiting for the finish of that game still, but ending the book so suddenly with an odd and detached “and many years later” little addendum left me flummoxed. I actually checked the binding of my copy to make sure there weren’t some pages missing. Aside from that unfortunate choice, still highly recommend this wonderful work.

Bomber Missions: Aviation Art of World War II by G.E. Patrick Murray

4.0

Inspired to purchase this book after visiting the Aviation wing of the Smithsonian. Over one of the entry ways was a breathtaking painting splendidly capturing a moment of history. This book does the same thing albeit on a smaller scale. Each painting in the book is accompanied by a terse background on the action depicted in the painting. This book does not glorify war--it pulls no punches when detailing the lives lost, the careers derailed and what if any impact on the war effort resulted from that action. Good if you like history and certainly a feast for the eyes if you just like art.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

5.0

Since the theatrical releases of Blade Runner in 1982 and Total Recall in 1990, more people have probably discovered Phillip K. Dick through the movies than his books. It helps too when Dick’s infinitely superior titles (DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP & I CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE) are teased in the credits or ad material. Of the movies, Blade Runner has achieved a particular cult status. Having seen the movie several times before reading the book, I was somewhat concerned that my enjoyment of the book would be diminished…I needn’t have been. While I enjoyed the movie, Blade Runner merely takes a layer of frosting off the top of the book’s cake. Like most of his works, Philip K. Dick not only makes his point but circles around and makes it again from several different angles. The movie and book actually co-exist wonderfully—the slice Blade Runner took is clean and self contained—hunting the artificial humans is virtually the whole show. This thin slice is padded by groundbreaking visual effects and a future/tech noir packaging. Any style or noir in the book is incidental. The hunt for the “Andys” (nickname for androids) is the engine that drives the story but the real show of the book is identity. Dick applies layer after layer of the ways an identity is shaped and defined and erased—drugs, religion, work, consumerism, marriage, intelligence and the self regard that is alternately squashed and inflated by the manipulation of these elements and more. Simply being on earth vs. living off earth might be the strongest identifier of all. Because of a few too many wars, earth is contaminated and decaying and the low rung on the ladder. The title became more brilliant as the book progressed, moving from an amusing play on words to a sharp assessment of how Andy’s might self-identify and be manipulated like anyone else by desperate acts of consumerism and the pursuit of status. This climbed up to my second favorite book by Philip K. Dick—the first being THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE—and helped cement him as one of my favorites.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

5.0

One of my favorite books is Melville’s MOBY DICK because for me it seems to be a book that is at once of it’s time and yet exists outside of time. The same for Cervantes DON QUIXOTE—a book that clearly represents its world but at the same time does so in a fashion that is forward thinking and from which the future will draw grand inspiration. Both books can be read as straightforward adventure stories. Beyond being a saga of the sea, MOBY DICK is the first techno-thriller with amazingly detailed evocations of whale hunting and DON QUIXOTE not only created the novel but brilliantly blurs the lines between reality and an unreliable narrator. I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson joins this category. At first blush a straightforward monster story, it becomes so much more as it moves along. Robert Neville is the last conversational man on earth. There are other people around but they have all been transformed into vampires which makes Neville’s life a bit of a struggle. Published in 1954, this story echoes through many of the thrillers that would follow it. Even the current spate of zombie dramas owes a dept to Matheson. At once a new breed of vampire story, it is also a medical thriller, social critique and personal drama. As he did with another of my favorite stories, THE SHRINKING MAN, Matheson gives a wonderful sense of normalcy to his setting before gradually revealing something more bizarre. The day to day grind of a life lived alone and the thin margin of his survival are felt from each page. My concern when I began reading was that such a promising beginning would likely dwindle down to nothing as many thrillers or horror novels tend to do. Near the end it turns in a direction that I did not expect and ends wonderfully with the main character making a decision he has actively avoided for reasons that he could never have imagined. A short novel who’s brevity works to its advantage, this edition also includes several short stories including his classic PREY about a very active doll and single woman with mommy issues. All the stories are good to great and fit well with the sense of isolation inherent in the title novel.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett

4.0

The subtitle of this book is a little misleading. The "Detective" ostensibly refers to an actual Police Detective involved in only a very small portion of the book and/or a zealous book seller who mainly just publicized the thief of the title. The true detective of the piece is the author who puzzles together a nice character study of THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH. The book thief runs the gamut from mysterious man of intrigue to pitiable fool then back somewhere in the middle where his is really just a self deluded jerk. How and why he so easily runs-amuck in the tender world of book collectors and book sellers unfolds gradually revealing as much about the victims as it does the thief. Before reading, I was expecting more of a cat and mouse game across international borders. It is instead a very domestic affair with Book Sellers members of an insular family embarrassed about any wrongdoing among their brethren. They suffer from an old school honor system--seemingly drawn from the antique books they handle--that makes it difficult for them to see the world in terms of strict capitalism. The author touches on a rich history of people loving books too much but show how only recently the sky-rocketing values and slick modern fraud/purchasing possibilites are dragging this world into a new glaring light. Very interesting stuff and worth the journey.

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books by

3.0

First I will have to cop to a certain proclivity for top ten lists and also for the tabulation of points based upon an item’s appearance on those lists to make other top ten lists. Then if you make those top tens the favorite books of 125 contemporary authors, you have me hooked. This is a nice book to pick through at your leisure over time, otherwise reading list after list could become rather maddening. After the author’s lists, a synopsis of each book appears in the order of its popularity from the top tens. There are 544 books listed which let me know two things. First--many books appear on multiple lists and second-- despite that, I still found a treasure trove of books that I have never heard of and am now crazy curious to find. For example, MAN’S FATE by Andre Malraux, IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA by Raymond Roussel, THE WAR OF THE NEWTS by Karel Capek, AUTO-DA-FE by Elias Canetti and several more. The somewhat redundant appearance of certain books reflects that most of the authors were Western, white and predominantly male—that is a drawback. I would also have liked some archival work referencing writers no longer with us and the books they liked and referenced during their careers. Possibly another book. And of course it is quite difficult to read this book and not be inspired to create my own list:
WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
MOBY DICK by Herman Melville
TWICE TOLD TALES by Nathaniel Hawthorne
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston
DEAD SOULS by Nicolai Gogol
CATCHER IN THE RYE by JD Salinger
SHIP OF FOOLS by Katherine Anne Porter
GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

And of course I cheated by putting eleven. Before you judge me, try it yourself.

Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks

2.0

I will start by saying that I really wanted to like this book better than I did. I was hopeful because the book started well. I was caught up in the different character's voice's, their dialect and phrasing set each character nicely apart as the narration duties swung from one character to the next. I could taste the dust of the Lincoln, Texas streets where the main characters lived in poverty and racial seclusion and feel the grit of their disappointed lives begin to come into focus. However as the story moved along, where the focus should have sharpened it instead became glassy-eyed. The ear for dialogue and the amusing antics that peppered the beginning began to pummel the ears and ring a tad hollow. Moments where the characters did ponder their lives felt forced into the last third of the book and were not so much delivered as the quiet revelations' they should have been but instead were stretched thin with too many words describing too little. And the ending felt tacked on like a hallmark card on an undertakers door. On the whole there were positives to be enjoyed but I think in this case, the author's history as a playwright of much renown has let her down. There were no actors to give weight where the characters needed it nor could they convey with a look what the author failed to do with a paragraph.

Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World by Sarah Vowell

4.0

I have been a fan of Sarah Vowell since hearing her little girl fights squeaky door voice on NPR a decade ago or more. Upon hearing her voice delivering one of her essays, it is virtually impossible not to hear it as you read her. While the voice is unique, it is the flow that really stays with you. As a reader, you know where the pauses fit and why and where to rush ahead a little before catching your breathe again after a well delivered punch line. Essays about her childhood invariably touch on some aspect of American history, while her essays about history reveal that America is a family that we are all a part of for better or ill. She has a great way to sum up the often conflicting emotions we have about families and history in her essay about the forced Indian migration known as The Trail of Tears: "When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife. Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance." This book TAKE THE CANNOLI is a collection of her earlier works. Some I had heard on the radio but I did not mind visiting them again. Though the work is often topical, it does not suffer with the passing of time or the passing away of cultural reference points. This is a testament to the precision of her prose. She stays with the humorous marrow even when the flesh has been gleaned from the historical bones. Highly recommend anything she has written though this is probably more accessible than some of her more history centric works like THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT and THE WORDY SHIPMATES--both of which I love.

The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman

5.0

The essence of memory is that we rarely get right to the heart of the matter. Something floats up into our thoughts and teases out a recollection. If that recollection has an emotion attached, then we are pulled down deeper towards other memories. As those memories gather about us, the world is recreated for us as it once was. Or at least how we saw it once upon a time. Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean’s MR. PUNCH is all about how we access memory. The story starts with shallow memories, brief bits about his grandparents. Each round of memories adds depth, and soon they begin to connect. There is a wonderful sense of tension built up as the story progresses. The traditional puppet show of Punch & Judy is retold in various forms and fragments--working like memory does in bits and pieces. The puppet show acts like a mirror of the memory that we are eventually being drawn toward. The wonderful illustrations are dark like half remembered images and many contain bits of this and that tossed together like disorganized thoughts. The images become more detailed and tangible as we get deeper but seldom is there anything particularly bright to hang hope on. There is no hope in memory, they are what they are. We can glean some understanding, but must be concerned about them taking over our lives—a point the book makes very well. MR. PUNCH does not seem like much at first and it knows this. Sparse at the dialogue keeps you moving until it knows it has you hooked. This is a wonderful creation starting like a light mist until by the end it has become an emotional downpour.