2666 - Wow, just wow. I get the comparisons to Blood Meridian, but this book is so much more.

1000 pages or something? Man, I don't know if I can do that any more....

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I'm a man. I'm 40 years old. I'm going to read the fucker...IN SPANISH!

Any of you idiotic idiots ever read Twelve Mighty Orphans? Was wondering if it was any good before I bought it. Seems like it could be kind of silly, but I go in for books like this.

Same guy (Jim Dent) wrote The Junction Boys, about a grueling Bear Bryant pre-season practice camp during a heat wave at Texas A as well as M team.

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I just finished Children of Dune, which is the third book in original Dune trilogy. It's probably the worst book I've read in at least a decade. It's about one part action and four parts people standing around prophesying or making cryptic and convoluted plans in which you have zero investment as a reader.

Passing through Bluff, Illinois, this week? It's that little hamlet sandwiched (threesomed lol) between Oxville and Bethel. You know the one.

Well, they are giving away some used books all summer. They got a little plastic table set up. Like a college bar after midnight, just grab what you like--no formalities necessary. And if you find yourself pining for those bright lights? Well, hell--Jacksonville is just twenty-odd miles down the road.

Happy book hunting!

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You have to be locked up to get free books in Jacksonville.

hamlet: a small ham.

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I finished Killers of the Flower Moon recently. It was an entertaining read, but it didn't blow my mind like it did the minds of a lot of other people in my life. It read like a novel, which always makes me suspicious when it comes to non-fiction books. I'm assuming he took some liberties with the truth to make the narrative hold together.

Very possibly it had some massaged content. But I loved it. The ending threw me a bit.

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Overall, I liked it. I knew absolutely nothing about the Osage and all that oil money. The ending was kind of crazy, but I won't say more because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who is thinking about reading it or seeing the movie this fall.

Someone recommend me a book. Hussra, Deacon, Tall Midgét, anyone.

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Some good ones I've read recently:

1. Like You'd Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard. It's a collection of short stories that are loosely based around the theme of relationships, both funny and sad in parts;
2. Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski. It started out life as a nonfiction account of missionaries in Thailand, but Berlinski shifted gears during the writing process and turned it into a novel. It's extremely detailed and the characters come off as real people drawn in three dimensions; or
3. Middlemarch by George Eliot. It's status as a classic is richly deserved. It's thick, but a quick read.

Good luck. There's giant piles of shit out there.

Chained Heat meets Running Man (updated for the first-person shooter generation) with some Battle Royale/Hunger Games thrown in wrapped around an extended excogitation on Freedom-not-Freedumb

Middlemarch is top five for me. Probably time to revisit it. Might check out the others, too, including Hussra's.

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Dog Man. Warning: There are a lot of them.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

The Mouse and the Motorcycle.

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2018
#ExtendLafleur

Ever read The Mouse Rap? Good book.

You can call me Mouse,
'cause that's my tag.
I'm into it all,
everything's my bag.
My ace is Styx, he'll always do,
Add Bev and Sheri,
and you got my crew.

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No, I haven't.

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2018
#ExtendLafleur

I recently finished Nemesis by Philip Roth. While he foreshadows the ending of the book from its first chapters, he manages to obscure the point of the book, or at the very least he fooled me, until its final chapter. It was one of the shorter Roth books, but one of his best.

Was looking for a scary book to celebrate Samhain. The last two years, I read books about Hell. So I did the same this year.

I read A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck. It's a novella that will take two hours, and though it has a lot of clunkiness to it, I loved it. It's an existential hell (the main character's name is Soren ), and it takes off from that Borges story about the universe's largest library. Like I said, some clunkiness (what's the deal with his obsession with race?), but a lot of fun to read.

The time aspect of the book is amazing. It really is.

Most of the books on Heck I have read deal with fire and brimstone and are more or less torture porn, but this was different (yet still dreadful enough).

They have it on Colloquy, too.

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More hellaciousness:

Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell, by Nathan Ballingrud. Fun read.

Five short stories and a novella. Worth reading when you are in the mood for horror inspired by Satan and Satanists. Almost every story deals with people traveling to Heck, though we never get the full-on glimpse into Mordor. I was hoping for the full-on glimpse.

However, it's got some insane imagery! Very creative. Lots of gore, which doesn't achieve much, but the landscapes are insane. Dante-level, Tolkien-level creativity! Some interesting characters, too--though I wanted to hear more about some of them (Beverly Toussaint, mostly). Fun and often disturbing. A few stories (especially the first one) are sort of noir-ish, too.

Like most horror and religion, the real problem is that on some level, it doesn't make sense. The book is as detailed as heck when it comes to blood-letting and body-slicing, but it gets strategically vague when it comes to explaining Satan. Like, if he is anti-God and does the opposite of what God does, that would fall in on himself. Better to present Satan as a king or mobster--that would make sense--rather than (spoilers). Or present Satan as a leader from a backwards time, like in Soviet Russia or the parts of the Middle Ages.

Just me being picky; the stories seemed ripped from our nightmares about Hell, and maybe that is enough!

Have always been interested in Hell because I was born with, as my oma said, "sie mark of Jesus." (She was born in Bavaria, not the godless, Lutheran North.) So I am going to haaaaaayyvunnn. But I wanna know how the other half lives, ya know?

OC as well.

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Halfway through Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. It's about a family dealing with totalitarianism taking over Ireland (of all places). It's really good, but a hard read since there are few paragraph breaks, no quotation marks, the dialogue runs together, etc. Once you get the hang of it, it's not so bad, but it is tiring and there's more re-reading than usual for me. It also produces an interesting effect on reading the book--I haven't been able to name it yet, but it's uncomfortable . . . as it is supposed to be.

It just won the Booker Prize.

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Nice prize. Like a Super Bowl win and it gets you the Footbally Trophy.

I've been picking and choosing amongst the National Book Award finalists for a while now. However, while I've stumbled into a few Booker Prize winners (Midnight's Children, Amsterdam, and The Blind Assassin) I've never made a systematic attempt to read through the finalists or winners of that prize.

In my neighborhood we have a bunch of little libraries in peoples yards. Picked up a copy of "The Kite Runner" and finished it around Thanksgiving. It was a very good book. Saw they had a movie made from it and looks like it was some kind of "B" movie production so skipped it.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

It's a good quest, but a few of them are not my cup of tea--or, more accurately, just too damn difficult (with all the foreign cultural references I am too lazy to look up). Midnight's Children is obviously at the top of the list, but my two favorite are Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and Sacred Hunger. Sacred Hunger is a big fat book, but eminently readable. I liked Amsterdam well enough, but I don't think I have read The Blind Assassin. I've told people I have read it, but I was just looking through it, and there's no way I did. The Narrow Road to the Deep North was good. Ain't read every year's winner since the mid-2000s.

Prophet Song was very good but maybe not great. Took a lot of effort up front, but you really get submerged into this character and her anxieties. (My hilarious plot twist is that Ireland does not turn totalitarian in the book; instead, Eilish, the main character, just has runaway anxiety. Now that's funny.) It's been a while since I've been that submerged into a character.

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It was a world-wide best seller, penned in English!

And then they made the movie using languages spoken in Afghanistan (Farsi? and Pashtun for sure). Re-make that using the language of champions, and you'll make even more money, Inshallah.

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