Books

Book Store Ruminations – Salinger

5 February 2010

So J.D. Salinger passed away. I certainly am not pretentious enough to call Salinger an influence, but I believe that reading Salinger was influential on me as a writer. While I don’t think that anything he’s published is ‘bad’, my favorite of the stuff out there is 9 Stories, followed by the Glass stories, and [...]

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Juliet, Naked

1 December 2009

At least three of Nick Hornby’s books – High Fidelity, About A Boy, and Songbook are on my list of favorite books. I see a lot of myself in their nerdy neuroses and self-destruction and redemptive epiphanies that are inexorably (I use this word a lot, I think) tied to music. Hornby’s other novels are [...]

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Jefferson Reads: Jeff Somers’ Avery Cates Series

20 August 2009

I’m discovering that I’m rarely a fan of hard sci-fi, but do have a certain affection for the more cyberpunky bits of it (except, oddly, for the savagely dated Neuromancer; in fact, Gibson’s later stuff, which people don’t seem to like as much, is my favorite of his material). An even smaller subset of that, [...]

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The New Zombies, or Shorty!

19 August 2009

We all know that zombies are played out right now, yes? While they rehabilitate in limbo for a little while, let’s ponder what’s next for a second.  What’s the next big thing that will catapult any nugget of consumable entertainment into the withering lens of the pop culture zeitgeist for a few seconds? I think [...]

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The Nature of Things

4 August 2009

Sometimes things that don’t happen to people happen to me. You know, like when you watch a movie and some character is saying something scathing and derogatory about some other character, and he notices the slack-jawed wide-eyed faces of his audience and says, “She’s behind me, isn’t she?” That doesn’t happen in real life, right? [...]

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Emotional Fuckwittage

11 June 2009

I enjoyed Bridget Jones’s Diary. I’ve been programmed against it.  Up until a few years ago, I took pains to avoid the ‘Bridget Jones’ genre, that portmanteau of chick lit that has been cobbled together in the wake of the Helen Fielding Riots of the mid-90s, a literary suitcase into which every book about a [...]

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Jefferson Stolarship Is Sick Of Being Single

22 May 2009

In anticipation of another blog project I’ve been toying around with, I’ve started read ‘chick lit’. It’s a safe bet that this heady blend of onanism/introspection and melodrama is up my alley, since I spend a good deal of my own personal time wallowing in my own onanistic, introspective melodrama. Hell, one of my trusted [...]

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Book Review: Wicked Game by Jeri Smith-Ready

18 May 2009

I’ve read novels about quirky female protagonists falling in love with vampires before and I’ve found them to be a huge mixed bag. On one hand, there’s Twilight and its sequels, which I find tenuous and unreadable. On the other hand, I like Sookie Stackhouse. I didn’t know what to expect going into Wicked Game, [...]

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Book Review: The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt

14 May 2009

I know that I’m supposed to be boycotting Tor books or something, but I’m not going to stop supporting a publisher when the publishing industry as a whole is already in dire straits.  Besides, Tor occasionally puts out a really fun, engaging piece of genre that i can’t put down. Like The Court of the [...]

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