One of the best books I have read. Beautifully written story of one man's life-long development. Incredibly sad, incredibly smart.

Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee is a strange novel about a number of aimless young characters who interact with each other. I cannot decide if I think that anyone could write this book, or no one but Tao Lin could write this book. His characters are bored/boring, empty, and real in a way that most authors do not approach. The book is sad and funny, and interspersed with surreal scenes of teleporting bears, talking hamsters, suicidal dolphins and indie filmmaker Wong Kar Wai. I've heard he wants to call his next novel "The statutory rape of Dave Eggers by Al Gore."

Kindred was tough to put down. Both exciting and thought-provoking. One of the better books I've read in a while.

I will say this about this, and you won't all like it: pick a story and read it. Pick another story now, and read that too. Put it down. You have now read Jesus' Son, and you will think "these stories are striking and wonderful." But read all the stories in their proper order, and you might think (at least I did), "these stories are all the same. The first two were wonderful, but after them I felt I was dealing with a one trick pony, and one trick ponies are no kind of pony to be." If you understand what I am saying call me. My number is 610 608 8##3.

Samuel Delany is a wonderful writer. Neveryona is about a teenage girl name Pryn from a provincial town in the land of Neveryon. She flies from home on a dragon, beginning a beautifully written, exciting and incredibly engaging story. Pryn goes from place to place, meeting different characters and always adding to her knowledge of the world (and consequently to the reader's as well). The book explores themes of gender, sexuality, power and storytelling.

What other author seemlessly weaves quotations and ideas from Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Jane Jacobs, a character with a slavery fetish and dragons? The answer is no other author.

I'm not sure what this book was about. I read it a couple weeks ago. I know there was an amnesiac and sex, and it took place amidst a bizarre island community. It reminded me of The Magus and Memento and also this softcore show I watched on cinemax once about a sexy hotel. A compelling combination to be sure, but for some reason it just didn't jibe for me, despite being attractively written. Oh well, all books can't be winners and all writers can't be Samuel Delany.

Oh my, this is a nasty little book. An ex-revolutionary cuts a deal and turns himself into the authorities. He is eventually let go, and begins a five-year process of "rehabilitation." During these five years, he works in a strip club, commits rape, bribery, robbery and murder, all on the path to becoming a respectable member of society. A winner.

Carlotto is an Italian writer with a seemingly mean-spirited view of the world. This book is certainly comparable to works of American noir like Cain's POSTMAN, but it is also capable of some more thought-provoking moments and a level of subtlety that POSTMAN never really demonstrated.

Overall, this was a quick and enjoyable, if quite unsettling read.

I loved it for about the first 400 pages or so and then I started to lose interest. I'm not sure if it was my own fault or the book's, but there are parts of this book that are wonderful.

Ostensibly, it is about the 1960's and the counterculture, and struggles against it in a truly pastoral Batavia, New York. I bizarre magician/criminal (?) comes to town and turn everything upside down. As I've said, I think there are parts of this book that deserve a lot of praise, but as a whole I didn't quite get it. It doesn't quite hold together. Certainly worth reading, however.

I don't know why I've rated this book so low. A couple books by Michaels are being reprinted soon by FSG (Collected Stories and Sylvia) and I thought I'd give this one a shot to see what he was like. The book is about a group of domesticated 1980's men in the Berkeley, CA area who gather one night to form a "men's club." They don't know what the club will be, but as the meeting starts they begin to share with each other personal stories about lust and power. The men bond during the course of the meeting, and seem to shake loose from the bounds of their everyday lives. They throw knives, drink too much and generally revel in embarassment (?). The book reads very much like a play- it takes place all in one setting and is incredibly dialogue driven. There were plenty of points that tickled me, but overall I was left thinking "so what?" No harm in giving it a read though, it's short and fairly entertaining.

This was a very good book. Reading it, I was the most excited I'd been about literature in some time. The story's pretty simple: A young man in Nebraska has a bad car accident. He is left with a rare mental disorder. He refuses to believe that his sister is actually who she says she is, despite all evidence to the contrary. Add to this a mysterious note, a local political struggle over water and its effects on the massive numbers of birds who use the area as a stop-over point in their yearly migration, and an author of popular science books suffering from a midlife crisis.

All these aspects of the story are at heart mundane, but Powers injects the story with a mysterious quality and a constant stream of ideas that make for a mindfuck of a read. The book is slow and thoughtful but also impossible to put down.

The title isn't a lie my friend. These adventures truly are (i)amazing(/i).

Gather round, i'll explain. Two cousins, both jewish, one from Brooklyn, one from Prague. Both like to (b)draw and dream(/b). I don't want to give too much away, but this story is epic and moving and it deserved to win the pulitzer prize in fiction, and non fiction and also journalism. Because that's the kind of book this is. I'm laying it down for you to pick up.

I don't want to give too much away. I ought to listen to the dirty 3 more, everytime i do I really enjoy it. This is my least bounded review yet. Every day i am so much freer.

Nina Berberova apparently wrote "the Book of Happiness" while living in Paris, sometime in the late 20's or early 30's. It's about Vera, a Russian emigree, and three unique relationships in her life (one in pre-revolutionary Russia, one in post- and one in France). The book really is largely about happiness. We don't think very much about what happiness is, where it comes from, what it should feel like. Berberova's narrator is keenly aware of these things, her own pursuit of happiness, her own need for it and her lack of guilt over finding it.

This is a strange book. It is slow and thoughtful. It doesn't feel dated to me at all. At one point one of its characters muses that love is always changing; that twenty years earlier it was something different, that it will be recreated anew by the generations to come. That may be true, but this book shows that happiness has been constant and elusive, at least since the author's time. That it is something that needs to be and ought to be sought for and earned. wtf, right?

Hmmmm. Doctorow you say? I say he is a postmodern writer. I say he likes the creaky corners of american history. I say he likes midgets. I say he likes to write humorous scenes of masturbatory bliss. I say I'm drunk...

Just read it (or don't).

Capote's first novel. The story of a boy (Joel Knox) who moves from New Orleans to a lonely and decayed southern estate to finally meet his father. He finds a mystery at his new home, and a cast of haunted characters.

The book is largely about gender and sexuality. His uncle sometimes dresses as a society woman, his best friend wishes she were a boy, and Joel himself wrestles with his nascent (homo)sexuality.

Not as engaging as some of Capote's other stuff, but still a telling book by an amazing writer.