Just finished it actually. A dark, interesting little book. I liked it more than Slaughterhouse Five.
I am curious about Vonnegut’s view of religion having read it – some quick research (and much of his novels) suggests he was an atheist, but I can’t see a definitive answer. His characters appear to knowingly [...]

Along with the wonderful V, I am reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.  So far, I am hard pressed to think of a novel I have enjoyed less.
The novel apparently examines “identities and personal relationships in a multicultural society” and “taps into universal tensions and dilemmas around family life and child-rearing”.  So far, though, I [...]

I am thoroughly enjoying V by Thomas Pynchon so far.
The novel is roughly divided between the listless drifting of post WWII New York City, the byzantine European intrigues of pre-WWI Florence and the surreal horrors late 19th Century/early 20th Century German colonial Africa.  As well as being a fascinating read in its own right it [...]

Shamefully, I have never read this before.
Needless to say, it’s a fascinating insight into a strange American era.  The book is filled with tension between the sudden possibilities of life in the postwar United States – the trajectory hinted at in the Great Gatsby followed through to its logical conclusion where cars, sex, alcohol, divorce, [...]

I have never read any Cormac McCarthy before.  This is grim, raw, intermittently violent, and relentlessly dark.  The style, which grated slightly at first due to its wilful simplicity (no ‘distracting’ punctuation and the like and very Hemingwayish) has grown on me, and despite conveying a bleak and difficult world the prose flies by.
The story [...]

Totally fascinating.  Written by Mervyn Peake who was himself quite fascinating: a brilliant writer and artist who died prematurely of Parkinson’s disease, with many ideas yet to be reduced to written form.  So far the book is something akin to what you would get if Dickens wrote a fantasy novel.

So far so good.  I’ve read The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night which I very much enjoyed, and this seems equally good.

I came across this amazing photo of a dust storm hitting a town in Texas during the Dust Bowl, the cataclysmic climate event which caused a huge migration of people out of farming areas of the U.S. and Canada in the 1930s:

Poor farming practices, drought and wind combined to strip the land of its topsoil [...]

Rather ponderously paced, but an interesting insight into the drastic effect the corporatisation of farming had in the U.S. The theme of vast, anonymous commercial organisations arbitrarily destroying productive industries and lives certainly resonates in 2009.

I really enjoyed “Music That Makes You Dumb“, an admittedly psuedo-scientific analysis of intelligence vs musical preferences.  Basically, one Virgil Griffith has assembled data on music taste based on U.S. college campuses, then compared that data with the high school scores required to get into each college to produce an assessment of the correlation between [...]

Fight Club is starting to look somewhat prophetic this week – a number of recent events are reminiscent of ‘Project Mayhem’, Tyler Durden’s plan to bring down the structures and sensibilities of conservative/capitalist America (apparently loosely based on the Cacophany Society).
Specifically:

U.S. broadcaster Comcast ’somehow’ showed 30 seconds of porn to some viewers during its broadcast [...]

Further to the post about Harry Nicolaides, I thought I would add a link to the case of Associate Professor Giles Ji Ungpakorn, a Thai academic who is seemingly about to be charged under the same antiquated and anti-democratic laws.
His crime?  Trying to better the lot of Thais by conducting open dialogue (by way of [...]

This is disgraceful: a Melbourne man, Harry Nicolaides, has been jailed in Thailand for three years for insulting the Thai royal family in a novel he has apparently written.  The conviction is a result of Thailand’s anachronistic “lese majeste” laws, which make insulting the royals an offence punishable by 3-15 years prison.  As this website [...]

I guiltily enjoyed this rant by Timothy Egan in the NY Times about people who become “writers” as a result of celebrity or unusual life experiences rather than the possession of actual writing ability.
Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and [...]

Further to this post, Simon points to this fairly lengthy but fascinating excerpt from big Al’s new book.
Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American [...]