Butt-Ass Crazy

How can you not want to see Grindhouse after reading this review on Ain’t It Cool News? I’ve never read or heard more enthusiastic appraisal for anything, even crack.

The Book-a-Week Project, Week 12

The Littlest Hitler: Stories
Ryan Boudinot

With a title like that, I looked forward to a collection of crass, over-the-top stories. The title story, even with its funny, weird premise of a fourth-grader going to school as Hitler for Halloween, isn't over the top. When the popular girl comes as Anne Frank, the story becomes a meditation on cliques, family, and the awkwardness of trying to manage life in the strange social environment of grade school.

For the most part, the remaining stories function similarly; a piece of weirdness is injected into an otherwise banal situation and watched. In “Bee Beard”, the beard of bees a woman wears to work destroys her burgeoning romance with a co-worker. Other stories feature suburban cannibalism, state-enforced parricide, and packs of hopped-up, murderous salesmen. Despite their premises, the stories in The Littlest Hitler are (mostly) subtler than one would anticipate, and far more striking because of it.

Now if I can just finish Jenny and the Jaws of Life by Jincy Willett before the week is out, I'll be back on track.

The Book-a-Week Project, Week 11

The Final Solution: A Story of Detection
Michael Chabon

The Final Solution is a compact and satisfying detective novella composed with writing so deft that it initially appears effortless. Sometimes it requires rereading passages to discover how meticulously each word is placed.

Some writers make me want to write. Some writers force me to realize how hopeless is that fantasy. Michael Chabon is among the latter.

Another writer whose prose has that effect on me is Joe Coomer. His Southern heritage is obvious from the first page, as he begins to set his novels’ slow, lingering pace. He spends so much time swirling each moment around in his glass that in some cases (Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God) it becomes boring. Mostly his examination and reexamination effectively shines the writing to a point that it’s worth the wait. Most likely, you’ll find that after the first fifty pages, you’ll lose your impatience. Apologizing to Dogs is the perfect example of that. Follow with The Loop, then A Flatland Fable.

I’m still behind in my reading, but since I’m the only one who reads this, I’m the only one to whom I need apologize. And I refuse your apology, sir. Stay the course and all will right itself in time, I say. Perhaps read a collection of short stories titled The Littlest Hitler by Ryan Boudinot, I say. What ho, I say.

The Book-a-Week Project, Week 10

The Shroud of the Thwacker: A Novel
Chris Elliott

Ah, hell. I'm behind already. I owed this review a week and a half ago. Here's the hurried version:

Funny people can not necessarily write funny. Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company is plenty evidence of that. It’s an unfunny, unpolished novel that wouldn’t have been published were Steve Martin not a celebrity.

The Shroud of the Thwacker is different, because Chris Elliott is a funny, talented writer. He writes as a character similar to the dopey, doughy idiot he played on Get a Life (which, by the way, is one of the best sitcoms ever) who’s researching the odd murders of Jack the Jolly Thwacker that took place in nineteenth-century New York. It contains fat albinos, dwarves, Teddy Roosevelt, and time travel. The extremely ridiculous sense of humor can be overwhelming in large doses, but it’s usually just very, very funny.

Next (but really currently: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. Mostly because it’s short.

The Book-a-Week Project, Week 9

Pastoralia: Stories
George Saunders

It’s a thrill to discover a book that makes me want to read everything that author has ever written. Pastoralia is that great. I’d already read Saunders’ The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, a children’s book that ought to be a classic, but moved slowly to his fiction. Fool!

Pastoralia’s stories are all ultimately sad ones – brief satires of industrial life, complete with emotional disconnectedness, selfishness, and ignorance – but none are bleak. Saunders has such affection for his characters that they’re never evil, even when they’re destructive. A story that in many other authors’ hands would leave the reader hopeless and angry has the opposite effect coming from Saunders’ pen. Highly recommended.

Another late review. Next, which is to say currently, is The Shroud of the Thwacker: A Novel by Chris Elliott. Yeah, that Chris Elliott! He’s a very funny writer! Yeah!