tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13049542007-08-10T17:23:08.993-04:00fulmerfordBlogger194125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-64622373381214302912007-08-10T17:22:00.000-04:002007-08-10T17:23:09.044-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Jon Savage's Teenage, and up in the queue is The End of Mr. Y and The History of Beauty. Dombey & Son was amazing. One of the best novels I've read in a long time--possibly one of the best novels I've ever read. And with some of the most indelible characters I've run across, everything from the ephemerally major, such as Paul Dombey Jr., the major major, such as

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-7308863366467132512007-06-03T10:25:00.000-04:002007-06-16T17:06:41.160-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Dombey and Son--about 200 pages into it and I'm just in a daze of joy (Dickens writes thick: everything's happening all at once and all his characters jump and cough and wheeze--their skin is alive but so is everything else about them, they're as animated as one can hope for--as do the locales. Everything bristles with life.) One Nation Under Goods does contain

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-32298169262233733442007-05-20T13:36:00.000-04:002007-05-20T13:39:24.118-04:00

Look for Jennifer Price's "Looking for Nature at the Mall" & Jon Goss's "Once-upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (March 1999): 47.

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-26549306610323695122007-05-04T13:40:00.000-04:002007-05-04T13:44:11.184-04:00

I forgot to add this lovely bit from Against the Day to the previous post: At a cafe off Katunska Ulica near themarketplace, Cyprian, sitting across a table from the cooing couple (whose chief distinction from pigeons, he reflected, must be that pigeons were more direct about shitting on one), at great personal effor keeping his expression free of annoyance, was visited by a Cosmic Revelation,

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-55303127500941884002007-05-03T15:16:00.000-04:002007-05-03T15:30:55.000-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Dan Simmons' The Terror, the 2006 Best American Stories anthology, and Lynda Barry's 100 Demons. Walker Percy Remembered stressed, more than anything I've read in recent memory, the tremendous isolation and small-c catholicism of some of my favorite writers: Percy emerges as a polite, interested, ethical, and highly reticent human being. There are also

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1160329387227101632006-10-08T13:34:00.000-04:002006-10-08T13:49:36.746-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan. I'm also reading Reed Darmon's Made in Japan and David Horace Harwell's Walker Percy Remembered: A Portrait in the Words of Those Who Knew Him. Found was a treat. As was Ernesto Lechner's Rock en Espanol: The Latin Alternative Rock Explosion, though the latter takes on a weird melancholic tone, what with all these fiercely

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1158245522720999102006-09-14T10:43:00.000-04:002006-09-14T10:52:02.773-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World. Cambpell's Overnight is good, not great, though it seems dead-on in its portrayal of a how a chain store operates--the general goodwill of its employees, the exhaustion, the dread of having someone mess up your section. It is actually sort of similar to Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1157401074243582632006-09-04T16:10:00.000-04:002006-09-04T16:17:54.320-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Ramsey Campbell's The Overnight. I'm also reading Dave McKean's Cages. Straight Cut was good--a solid, well-crafted novel that moves assuredly through crime territory, with plenty of local color (some of it takes place in Italy) and plenty of attention to detail (the narrator works as a film editor) and even some Kieerkegard. There's also this passage, which is

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1155792138942966592006-08-17T01:11:00.000-04:002006-08-18T15:37:13.766-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Madison Smartt Bell's Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime). Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place is good, but not great. You get to go inside the head of just about everyone in town, and each brief chapter is a joy--particularly the chapters where you're in cats and labradors and beavers--but the author has an annoying tendency to overuse fragments. Small bursts. Often

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1154201394364176382006-07-29T15:18:00.000-04:002006-07-29T16:04:38.766-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place: A Novel. Body Piercing Saved My Life is well worth reading if you, like me, are puzzled by why Christian rock exists, why people actually listen to it, and if you were under the impression that all of it was uniformly awful. It apparently is not. And the book is fair; it doesn't shy pointing out the absurdities and inconsistencies

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1153703587540694732006-07-23T20:42:00.000-04:002006-07-23T21:29:16.016-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock . Made to Break was full of detailed, interesting historical nuggets on obsolescence, but irritatingly short on insight. The book is good but undercooked; if anything, it seems to suggest that obsolescence serves a couple of really important functions, and that it's not the

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1151790599690916382006-07-01T17:37:00.000-04:002006-07-01T17:49:59.730-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Made to Break : Technology and Obsolescence in America. Moby Dick was fantastic, though it did take me three months to finish it. Also read Stephen King's Cell, Peter Straub's Lost Boy Lost Girl, Edward St. Aubyn's terrific, acerbic Mother's Milk , The Complete Peanuts 1959-1960, and Wimbledon Green, and Dave Barry's Money Secrets. All of these were pretty terrific

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1142623191006174382006-03-17T14:11:00.000-05:002006-03-17T14:33:38.530-05:00

What I'm reading right now is Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Second Edition (Norton Critical Editions) (various e-text versions here), partly out of respect for the advice of many wonderful UNLV folk, and partly because of this episode of Studio 360. (Don't have time for the full hour episode? Please please listen to this Laurie Anderson bit on the Enterprise v. the Pequod. Please.) Listener

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1139079748427201712006-02-04T13:50:00.000-05:002006-02-04T14:02:28.443-05:00

What I'm reading right now is Jack W. Mitchell's Listener Supported : The Culture and History of Public Radio. Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was a delight: funny and sweet and willing to talk about death in ways that were both respectful and frank. (One of the last chapters deals with plasticized bodies, and by odd dint of coincidence, or perhaps by unavoidable converge

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1138385426017702392006-01-27T12:58:00.000-05:002006-01-27T13:20:32.226-05:00

What I'm reading right now is Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Lint was good (though the joke erodes as one reads it through), as was Boring Postcards USA (lives up to its name), Mary Roach's Spook (a good, clear-eyed look at misguided, sometimes scientific (sometimes way pseudoscientific) efforts to pin down the afterlife (do not miss her footnote on the intrinsic

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1134495372266464572005-12-13T12:26:00.000-05:002005-12-13T13:44:05.630-05:00

What I'm reading right now is Steve Aylett's Lint, a way funny fictitious biography of a science-fiction writer who is a little like Philip K. Dick, a lot like many of the old Golden Age eminences (Lint submits stories as Asimov, figuring it's going to up his chances of publication; it does), and whose assassination conspiracy treatise figures that the Magic Bullet of JFK infamy has been

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1132254031678550972005-11-17T13:59:00.000-05:002005-11-17T15:30:57.240-05:00

What I'm reading right now is Heidi Julavits's The Effect of Living Backwards. I am also reading Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (various free e-text versions here) ten pages at a time. Both are really, really good so far--Burton for its humor & humanity & sheer abundance, and Julavits for some of the same, though her humor is cooler. Julavits sometimes sounds like Richard Powers, and

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1126218275344123482005-09-08T18:18:00.000-04:002005-09-08T18:24:35.350-04:00

What I'm reading right now is T.R. Ybarra's Young Man of Caracas--funny and urbane so far. The author is half-Bostonian and half-Venezuelan and all wit. Quotes will follow. (As they will from Can You Forgive Her?, which was good and ventured into darker territory than usual for Trollope, and even had a villain proper (Trollope's novels have deeply flawed but not really fully malign antagonists),

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1124744916165579572005-08-22T17:01:00.000-04:002005-08-22T17:08:36.170-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (Free e-text here.) The Gift is gorgeous, my favorite of VN's Russian novels for many reasons, but if anything for its rapt descriptions of being poor and in love and happy in a foreign land. Also read Lilek's The Gallery of Regrettable Food--the recipes are real, the mold-fixation was apparently real, and so yes: very funny.

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1124304843354767022005-08-17T14:46:00.000-04:002005-08-17T14:57:21.306-04:00

What I'm reading, right now, is Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift--enchanting, delightful, and thoroughly sustained and controlled and fantastic so far. Which no surprise. What I've read, during the long months of no updates: Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Och's 1,000 Record Covers, Lady into Fox, Devil in the Details, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances (sporadically wonderful, but marred by

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1112379421594002322005-04-01T13:12:00.000-05:002005-04-01T14:53:04.286-05:00

Reading (all at once, for reasons unknown: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything Michael J. Rosen's Mirth of a Nation Ricky Jay's Journal of Anomalies Bentley Little's The Association Charles M. Schulz's The complete Peanuts : 1953 to 1954 Read: Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? and the Thomas-Frank-edited Commodify Your Dissent. Berkeley Breathed's Opus : 25 years of

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1106336222779977272005-01-21T14:33:00.000-05:002005-01-21T14:37:02.780-05:00

What I'm reading right now is Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, in addition to working my way through my textbooks, all of which are good, though Readings for Writers is exceptional for its straightforwardness.

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1104346371111830952004-12-29T13:44:00.000-05:002004-12-29T13:54:40.743-05:00

What I'm reading right now is the 11th edition of Readings for Writers & the 4th edition of Signs of Life in the USA. I am also in the middle of reading Lisa Ede's Work in Progress, Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing, Stephen Minot's Three Genres, Ben Marcus's Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and an omnibus Best American Essays of the Century. All are being read in preparation for the

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1098205389581306392004-10-19T13:55:00.000-04:002004-10-19T13:05:39.946-04:00

What I'm reading right now is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

fulmerfordtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1304954.post-1096478831200843382004-09-29T13:21:00.000-04:002004-09-29T13:27:11.200-04:00

What I'm reading right now is W.N.P. Barbellion's Journal of a Disappointed Man. Good stuff so far and w/ one of the best opening lines ever: Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing on "How Cats Spend their Time." One feels in the middle of a moving, tragic true-life story or a wonderful hoax. But all cursory evidence points to the former. Read

fulmerford