Category: Reading Journal
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Brightbourne is a coy house
Coming up on halfway through Ian McDonald’s Hopeland, and I already have about a dozen quotes of similar size to this one that I might have held up, as I’m doing now, as a way of saying that is how you do it, that is great writing. The music accompanies them up the drive, heard…
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Coming to terms with learning to listen: Adam Soto’s This Weightless World
On New Year’s Day 2012, the SETI people finally receive an incontrovertibly extraterrestrial signal, which they announce in a hastily convened web-broadcast which, true to the time, much of the world does its best to watch despite the bandwidth issues. As one might expect, the enormity of this interjection into the rolling drama of human…
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how you write is what it’s for
Mike Harrison’s anti-memoir managed to be everything you thought it might be, but nothing at all like what you expected; that negating prefix to the generic category is an obvious warning, a hockey-stick graph where the y axis represents lateness of style, but such graphs—as has been demonstrated—are easily misinterpreted, and/or renarrated to provide comfort…
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Gravity’s rainbow for Gonzo: High White Notes by David S Wills
Wills’s thesis here is not at all controversial: he seeks not to challenge the accepted wisdom re: Hunter S Thompson as a once groundbreaking writer who became trapped in his own (deliberately constructed) literary persona, but rather to evidence that argument thoroughly by reference to Thompson’s published work, as well as to secondary sources, and…