I haven’t been using goodreads to keep track of my book consumption, and I need to keep track of it, so here goes.
TL;DR: The Best of Odd Things Considered by Anita Dalton – Dalton’s long-running blog started as I Read Odd Books, a compendium of book reviews of the unusual. It later developed into Odd Things Considered, to cover audio-visual and other media. I’ve followed the blog over the years, and always appreciate finding off-the-beaten-path conspiracy theories and weird fiction and stuff like that, so it’s always been great reading for me. I also appreciate when a review blog isn’t afraid to respond negatively to something, instead of only printing positive reactions and automatic five-star reviews of everything. There was a bit of controversy over this a few years ago, when Dalton went on a tirade about the poor editing and design of several Bizarro books, or her lengthy takedown of Tao Lin (years before the ER Kennedy allegations, when everyone posted a lengthy takedown of his work.)
Full disclosure: Dalton wrote a lengthy review of my book Sleep Has No Master about four years ago, which appears in the book. It’s a little weird to see someone write a long-form review of my work, going through story-by-story. Anyway, regardless of my appearance, I liked having a bunch of her blog archived in 600-some pages of paper, so I can flip open to a random page and start reading about true crime or 19th-century portraits of dead children.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson – A four-story collection that was completed right before Johnson’s death. This, unfortunately, has been marketed as the successor to Jesus’ Son, his absolutely flawless collection of short stories from twenty-five years ago. It isn’t, unfortunately. And it could probably be his last work published, unless Random House decides to pull a Bukowski and re-release another chopped up collection of the same essays and letters each year for the next century. The stories are very good, have a certain depth, but it’s not a five-star collection. It’s like the placeholder he’d release before a major Tree of Smoke-type book. It’s good to see a final book, but bittersweet that it’s a last book.
LiarTown: The First Four Years 2013-2017 by Sean Tejaratchi – Liartown is an absolutely incredible blog of expertly photoshopped images: vintage ads for corduroy porn, satirical paperback book covers, bizarre calendars, and other promotional material that at first glance looks professionally done, but contains absolutely absurd running jokes and dark humor. The blog (http://liartownusa.tumblr.com) is excellent, but the book is even better. Full color, 250 pages, complete overload. This is absolutely mandatory.
The Complete Book of the SR-71 Blackbird by Richard H. Graham – Every few years, I fall down an aviation k-hole where I end up buying one of these large-format color photo books, and this is the latest. This one is about four and a half pounds of full-color photos of the A-12 and SR-71, a complete summary of the aircraft’s secret testing, missions, and retirement. Lots of facts and stories, plus a bunch of pictures I’ve never seen. Obviously not for everyone, but this is the kind of book I keep on the shelf for cold and flu season, when I’m too out of it to read and want to sit in bed and go through a big tome like this.
What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography by Bruce Dickinson – Every time I swear I will never read pop autobios like this, I fall down some rabbit hole and end up buying one. Iron Maiden was an important bridge in my teenage years between prog rock bands like Rush and thrash metal like Metallica, but I admit I fell off the bandwagon around college, when there were better things to pursue. Dickinson’s led an interesting life, leaving the band to pursue an aviation career, then coming back to it. He allegedly wrote this book, although you know how that goes. (He did write another book of fiction back in the early 90s, so who knows.) What’s odd about this book is that he rushes through the Maiden stuff, and absolutely does not mention family, spouses, lovers, or children. So the pacing here is a bit bizarre, and it makes it seem like a lot is missing. Similarly, his bout with cancer (spoiler alert) doesn’t come up until twenty pages from the end of the book, and then it’s just a quick infodump of his treatment, which seemed almost glued in as an afterthought. Anyway, essential for fans, but a hard sell otherwise.
Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus – A collection of essays about the art scene in LA from the author of the book I Love Dick, which has recently blown up in popularity due to a Netflix series based on it. These were columns written in the mid/late 90s, and waver between buzzword-laden critical academic writing, and crazy stories of her personal adventures in the gritty world of the end-of-century LA, when too much dotcom money was floating around a pre-gentrified Los Angeles. That academic bits are exactly that, and I felt myself skipping past some of them. But the parts about her experience as a transplanted New Yorker in this weird world can be interesting. There’s a specific mid-90s pomo voice to this writing, which can now seem dated, but it’s an interesting time capsule of a city where I lived long after this was all over, and I liked that.
Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier – by Mark Frost – a nicely-designed, nicely-printed book filled with Agent Tanya Preston’s notes to her FBI superiors about the goings-on of the sleepy Washington town where weird things are going down. The material sits between the second and third series of the TV show, so it covers things that were briefly recapped in S3, but in much more detail. Good stuff, but it mostly made me realize I need to go buy the S3 BluRay and watch it a few more times in more detail.
That’s it for now. I’m still working through a pile of holiday books, and getting other things for review, so I should do this again in a month.
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