Tag Archives: 3 Kafkas

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis (1951)

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While waiting for a train, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are sucked back into a much-changed Narnia to help the rightful Prince Caspian regain his throne.  I’ve realized that for me the most lukewarm sections of the Narnia books are the battles, which Lewis relates either through dialogue, summary, or another distancing mechanism.  With World War II a recent memory in 1951, these battles are clearly important to Lewis, but fail to capture the modern imagination.  A shame, since the rest of this is quite immersive, with the Christian symbolism once again revealed in a more controlled manner.

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The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis (1955)

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After finishing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I decided to give the rest of the series a try—plus I found a cheap set of the other Narnia books at Salvation Army.  The Magician’s Nephew is Lewis’s prequel, with a Genesis-type story that tells how Narnia came to be, with more than a few Biblical allusions.  Though the first half is genuinely solid children’s lit (magic rings, a lost world, childhood observations, etc.), the creation scenes go on for far too long.  Still, it’s worth reading for the London sections and the introduction of the White Witch.

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My Untimely Death, by Adam Peterson (2008)

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For an entire week in September I ask my wife to feed me only Swiss chard.  There is a day when I eat a can of tomatoes bigger than a toddler.

This is a 43-page small press book that fits easily in a pocket—a series of prose poems about bizarre deaths.  I don’t write this kind of prose myself or read it very often, but I’ve developed an odd kind of respect for it, and enjoy it in small doses that evoke an emotional response before I move on.  In that sense, this little book accomplishes that nicely.

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More About this book from Subito Press

Sinbad’s Seven Voyages and Other Stories From the Arabian Nights, retold by Gladys Davidson (1974)

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Things I learned from reading/rereading these four stories:

  1. In the original tale, Aladdin, far from being a purehearted street rat, is an “idle, careless” boy who through the adventure of the lamp becomes a responsible, skilled adult man.
  2. The forty thieves dismember Ali Baba’s greedy brother into four separate pieces so that the local cobbler has to sew him back together, which is badass.
  3. The Sinbad stories are kind of repetitive, and made me want to watch the Ray Harryhausen films.
  4. Like in all good stories, servant girls are always more clever than their masters.
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Damned, by Chuck Palahniuk (2011)

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Damned is Chuck Palahniuk’s What-If? take on Hell told through the eyes of cynical rich girl Madison Spencer (“Are you there, Satan?  It’s me, Madison”) and her Breakfast Club-inspired gang.  Though there’s very little in terms of plot, Palahniuk instead takes us through encounters with pagan demons, Hell’s geographic oddities (The Great Plains of Discarded Razor Blades, etc.), its candy-fueled economy, its telemarketing industry, and its bizarre damnation rules (honking your car horn more than 500 times lands you in Hell, no exceptions).  Its whims are entertaining, but incredibly scattered, with an unsatisfying ending hindered by mediocre twists.

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As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Sterling, by Anne Sterling (2013)

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Anne Sterling’s memoir/biography of her father, Twilight Zone host, creator, and writer Rod Sterling, does twofold duty: on the one hand, Anne shows her father the writer, social activist, and continual innovator, while on the other she shows his decidedly human, funny, fatherly side through anecdotes and the many jokes they shared.  While I found myself most interested in Sterling’s early struggles to earn money for his writing and wrest creative control from the TV censors (and wish there was more to this section), Anne’s difficulties after her father’s untimely death also form a solid, more personal story arc.

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The Big Book of Porn, by Seth Grahame-Smith (2005)

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This coffee table book would have worked a lot better had it focused solely on a detailed guide to classic ‘70s and early ‘80s porn, since that section is filled with history, insights into the industry, and a ton of cool ‘70s movie posters.  The rest of the book, though, is eye-rollingly uneven, alternating between genuinely enlightening info and some seriously lame jokes.  The lowlight of these extras is an overly detailed discussion of fetish porn, while the highlight is a hilarious list of porn title spoofs (Genital Hospital, Hump Up the Volume, etc.) that had me in stitches.

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Lichtenstein, by Janis Hendrickson (1988, 2012)

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This picture-filled guide to Roy Lichtenstein’s career covers both his paintings of starry-eyed comic-book heroines (an example of which graces the cover), his images of everyday objects like washing machines and golf balls, and his later, more abstract paintings.  There’s also a close technical and thematic look at the Benday dots used in so many of his works.  Though I was most interested in Lichtenstein’s Pop Art images, the book covers much more, though the latter half goes into more depth than I was looking for.  Still, a solid introduction to Lichtenstein’s life and work with cool pictures.

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Where I Got It

At a bookstore in the Germantown section of Columbus, Ohio in summer 2015.  I’d been interested in Lichtenstein’s Pop Art works for a while (one of my teachers had a large “I’d Rather Sink Than Call Brad For Help” print on his office door in college, below), and buying this book was my reminder to actually learn more about him.

 

 

The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad (1907)

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A century before anyone would associate terrorism with Islam, Conrad both mocks and captures the gravity of the London anarchist movement and their fictitious plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory.  Mr. Verloc and his team of overweight, bumbling radicals spend a lot of time talking big about the evils of capitalism but prove disastrously incompetent when it comes time to plant the bomb.  Though the prose has its moments of humor and pathos, Conrad’s stuff hasn’t aged well and can make for long slogs through dense paragraphs.  Worth it, however, for its cynical twists on both capitalism and anarchy.

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Where I Got It

The longest-standing book in my pile (nearly 4 and a half years), I bought this hardcover copy at a town festival book sale along with The Epic of Gilgamesh and some others.  Part of a 1960s collection of Conrad’s works, it still had the dust jacket, with a monocle print of Conrad himself on the back cover.

Despite Conrad’s being Polish, this pic is the most British thing I’ve ever seen.

Updike, by Adam Begley (2014)

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Begley’s biography of writer John Updike exhaustively covers its hero’s rural Pennsylvania childhood, his stint as a twentysomething New Yorker writer, his years in suburban Massachusetts, his elderly descent into isolation, and his many, many novels.  Though Updike’s serial adultery plays a key role, Begley keeps the details vague for privacy reasons—unfortunate, since it often feels like there’s more we’re not getting as Begley instead summarizes the autobiographical facets of Updike’s vast oeuvre.  The result reads more like literary criticism than biography, but still decently flushes out one of America’s most prolific 20th century writers.

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Where I Got It

Ordered online in Fall 2016.

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Longer review

If you haven’t already, you should probably read Rabbit, Run instead, because it’s excellent.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1767)

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The whimsical freedom of the seventeenth century led to some of the most innovative fiction ever conceived, and Tristram Shandy is no exception.  Its narrator sets out to tell his life story but goes off on so many tangents that it takes him two hundred pages to get to his birth.  The book itself is chaotically filled with blank pages, scrawled lines, musical scores, skipped chapters, and entire sections written in Latin, plus a whole load of sex jokes for careful readers.  The innovations are fun, but the archaic prose makes for a challenging 650-page slog.

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3-kafkas

Where I Got It

An old Modern Library edition picked up from the English department free table, sometime in fall 2014.

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Full text at Project Gutenberg

Quick and Easy Guide to Reading Tristram Shandy (I really wish the person who made this site had kept it up, since it promised to be both funny and down-to-earth about a really difficult novel, and also because it compared Tristram Shandy to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book)

The Wicked + The Divine Book 1: The Faust Act, by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (2015)

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Amaterasu, Baal, and ten other gods from world mythology get reincarnated every ninety years; this time they’re taking the form of teenage pop stars and a little bit of hell breaks loose when Lucifer goes rogue.  The premise promises lots of action, and I loved artist Jamie McKelvie’s style, particularly the splash pages, where there’s always something to look at.  The collection also comes with variant covers and apocrypha that form the graphic novel equivalent of a DVD bonus menu.  Reading more chapters feels necessary to make a more concrete judgement, but I’m definitely liking the start.

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3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Gift from old college friend, Christmas 2015 (along with Book 2).

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Kieron Gillen’s Tumblr

Jamie McKelvie’s website