I have a question for you- July 27, 2005 I've been on quite the reading binge this summer. Just goobled up Nicholas and Alexandra, all 571 pages, in eight days. The old dave might have spent six months or a year on that. I'm still in the middle of The Genius Factory, but I had this urge to sink my teeth into something meatier. So I started Infinite Jest, which is 981 freaking pages before footnotes, which didn't necessarily intimidate me, though I'm 43 pages in and it's depressing the hell out of me. Could be just that I was depressed.http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/books/2005/07/27.html#a1659 Dirt is a magazine you never heard of- July 25, 2005 Because you don't live in Boulder. But I used to and I met one of my best friends there, in grad school, which apparently took quite a while to germinate for us. (Eight) years later, he has his first novel out, Girls For Breakfast, which you might have seen me shamelessly hawking here. But the Dirt people--Jennie Dorris, specifically--loved the novel and were nice enough to put him on their cover this week. And they included him on the inside, too--pretty funny interview. (He also got a great...http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/books/2005/07/25.html#a1657 Calling a dufus a dufus- July 14, 2005 Just watching Matt Tiabbi, author of Spanking the Donkey, interviewd on The Daily Show. Liked the guy immediately, then he told a little anecdote about his time covering John Kerry's campaign that ended like this: "So I have to give him credit for that, as much of a dufus as he is." Nice! From that moment on, I was in full swoon. This from an obvious leftie. The good kind, willing to tell the truth. No BS. The Dems nominated a dufus again. Twice in a row. (What is wrong with you people, by.http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/books/2005/07/13.html#a1646 The Genius Factory- July 13, 2005 I'm about 100 pages into The Genius Factory, and totally engrossed. From the first page--opening in-scene with a slightly wayward kid discovering his deadbeat dad is not really his dad; his dad was a genius and his mom knows he has great potential--I was hooked. Some of the stuff about eugenics I thought was slightly narrow-minded, but so far, that has been a brief abberation. Author David Plotz has a great sense of timing and of storytelling. He knows just how long to spend on each...http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/books/2005/07/13.html#a1644 |