Darwin8u's bookshelf: 100-mccaffery en-US Mon, 01 Apr 2024 06:47:21 -0700 60 Darwin8u's bookshelf: 100-mccaffery 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg J R 11721654 The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor - a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger - and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses - and misuses - whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him - a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures - shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music - burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths - voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios - a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

From the first-edition dustjacket]]> 726 William Gaddis 1564784339 Darwin8u 5 “I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!”
― William Gaddis, JR

description

How do you rate this adequately heh? Four stars allows that humanity (or Gaddis) might reach a little higher, dance a little quicker, squeeze a little more juice out of the GD lemon, but sitting here now it also seems like I would have to go and downgrade all previous fours if I only gave it four stars. Five it must be. Besides, if I rate it as five now, I can always downgrade it later, after reading The Recognitions and use the carry-forward star loss to offset the capital gains on my outstanding shares of stars.

I'm not sure my wife loved it, since it proved once and fore..., well unequivocally, that I'm a bad father yes, inadequate husband yes, don't sleep much hey and this may be (let all the F=ing challengers just try and knock it down) my GD favorite GD books in the whole GD world. This morning, with 100 pages left, part of me just wanted to loop the SOB and start reading it again once I finished. That 3am euphoria has since passed, luckily.

Recommendation to friends who read this after me ... try to read about 200 pgs/day, because GDs this book almost requires you read it GD fast. I read somewhere online (yes there it is GD Paris Review) that Gaddis said the secret to reading J R was "it was my hope -- for many readers it worked, for others it did not -- that having made some effort they would not read too agonizedly slowly and carefully, trying to figure out who is talking and so forth. It was the flow that I wanted, for the readers to read and be swept along -- to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way." Well, GD, the flow thing kinda works. It also helps that I have a GD series 7 and the financial stuff all made perfect f+ing sense.]]> 4.44 1975 J R
author: William Gaddis
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1975
rating: 5
read at: 2012/03/08
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: 2012, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:
“I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!”
― William Gaddis, JR

description

How do you rate this adequately heh? Four stars allows that humanity (or Gaddis) might reach a little higher, dance a little quicker, squeeze a little more juice out of the GD lemon, but sitting here now it also seems like I would have to go and downgrade all previous fours if I only gave it four stars. Five it must be. Besides, if I rate it as five now, I can always downgrade it later, after reading The Recognitions and use the carry-forward star loss to offset the capital gains on my outstanding shares of stars.

I'm not sure my wife loved it, since it proved once and fore..., well unequivocally, that I'm a bad father yes, inadequate husband yes, don't sleep much hey and this may be (let all the F=ing challengers just try and knock it down) my GD favorite GD books in the whole GD world. This morning, with 100 pages left, part of me just wanted to loop the SOB and start reading it again once I finished. That 3am euphoria has since passed, luckily.

Recommendation to friends who read this after me ... try to read about 200 pgs/day, because GDs this book almost requires you read it GD fast. I read somewhere online (yes there it is GD Paris Review) that Gaddis said the secret to reading J R was "it was my hope -- for many readers it worked, for others it did not -- that having made some effort they would not read too agonizedly slowly and carefully, trying to figure out who is talking and so forth. It was the flow that I wanted, for the readers to read and be swept along -- to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way." Well, GD, the flow thing kinda works. It also helps that I have a GD series 7 and the financial stuff all made perfect f+ing sense.
]]> The Recognitions 11786836 956 William Gaddis 1564786919 Darwin8u 5
What I understood was brilliant, what I didn't understand is most likely obscene. This is not a novel for the casual beach read, although as I write this, I am on a beach...washing sand out of my ebbs and salt off my flow, so never mind.]]> 4.38 1955 The Recognitions
author: William Gaddis
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2012/03/20
date added: 2024/03/31
shelves: 2012, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:
My first impulse was to just copy some old, obscure review of 'the Recognitions' and claim it as my own. Alas, even the reviewers, academics, and cult worshipers of the God of PoMo all seem at once thunderstruck AND intimidated by Gaddis' opus.

What I understood was brilliant, what I didn't understand is most likely obscene. This is not a novel for the casual beach read, although as I write this, I am on a beach...washing sand out of my ebbs and salt off my flow, so never mind.
]]> Underworld 4266011
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don Delillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome—the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World—shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.

The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture—from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.

A generation's master spirits come and go. Lenny Bruce cracking jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connected materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs, and miracle sites on the Web.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times—Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.]]> 827 Don DeLillo 0684842696 Darwin8u 5 Underworld was fantastic. It was an excavation novel. It was an extraction. It was a slow descent, a regression. I definitely have a pro-Delillo bias, but still think this novel (for me) fits among his best and strongest works. It was worth the time, the work, the emotional cost. Not Dostoevesky, but Underworld will be read, examined, analyzed throughout the next century while much that was written in the later-half of the 20th century is pulped, processed, and turned into IKEA furniture.]]> 3.95 1997 Underworld
author: Don DeLillo
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2011/05/31
date added: 2023/09/17
shelves: 2011, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:
Definitely not four, probably not exactly five. But sometimes five; fleeting moments, flickers, of five. The structure of Underworld was fantastic. It was an excavation novel. It was an extraction. It was a slow descent, a regression. I definitely have a pro-Delillo bias, but still think this novel (for me) fits among his best and strongest works. It was worth the time, the work, the emotional cost. Not Dostoevesky, but Underworld will be read, examined, analyzed throughout the next century while much that was written in the later-half of the 20th century is pulped, processed, and turned into IKEA furniture.
]]> Libra 527022 A major new novel of tremendous scope, ambition, and resonance for all Americans, from the author of White Noise

In his eight previous novels, Don DeLillo has taken on large tracts of the contemporary American experience and created a distinctive world where all the ambiguity, dread, and surpassing strangeness of our own time stand forth in high relief. In Libra, DeLillo has given us the novel the shaken American psyche has been awaiting for twenty-five years—a superbly veracious, artistically impeccable, and eerily convincing fictional speculation of the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The antihero of Libra is Lee Harvey Oswald, who is as hauntingly real in the book as he was elusive to us in reality. Here he is, as large and as small as life—joining the Marines, poring over Marxist texts, defecting to Russia, taking a potshot at General Edwin Walker, handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba committee, imagining himself as an agent of history. Then, "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives, who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on JFK's life, one that could be linked to Fidel Castro, is the only way to put Cuba back into geopolitical play—and that Oswald is the perfect instrument for their ambitions. We are plunged into the strange half-world of Bay of Pigs veterans, rogue agents, right-wing fanatics, mafia thugs, the whole peculiar mélange from which emerged the most shattering event of postwar history. Oswald's sign was Libra, the scales—and how he tilts will determine whether Dallas will be just another stop on the political itinerary or the locus of exploded American dreams.

From its first page Libra grips the reader with inexorable fascination; the seams between fact and invention in this book never show, and the characters—both real and created—are imagined with a novelistic virtuosity that is uniquely Don DeLillo's. Libra is grave and haunting and brilliant—Don DeLillo's finest novel to date and surely one of the most important novels of the decade.]]> 456 Don DeLillo 0670823171 Darwin8u 5 4.06 1988 Libra
author: Don DeLillo
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2011/01/04
date added: 2023/09/17
shelves: 2011, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Invisible Man 11787 Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.

As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying "battle royal" where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief. Suspenseful and sardonic, narrated in a voice that takes in the symphonic range of the American language, black and white, Invisible Man is one of the most audacious and dazzling novels of our century.]]> 439 Ralph Ellison 0375507914 Darwin8u 5 “I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

description

I can't believe I waited so long to read this. But part of me thinks I needed to wait to read this. Maybe, and this is hard to admit, maybe I wasn't ready for Ralph Ellison's masterpiece in my twenties or thirties. It was a fever dream. A jazz narrative. A hallucination of pain, beauty, struggle, and life. It was a Hegelian dialectic. It was a black whale just as real as Melville's Moby Dick. It still has me firmly in its grip. There are scenes in this book that are burnt into my mind and tattooed on my soul.]]> 4.02 1952 Invisible Man
author: Ralph Ellison
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/26
date added: 2020/02/27
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem, african-american, american, fiction, 2020
review:
“I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

description

I can't believe I waited so long to read this. But part of me thinks I needed to wait to read this. Maybe, and this is hard to admit, maybe I wasn't ready for Ralph Ellison's masterpiece in my twenties or thirties. It was a fever dream. A jazz narrative. A hallucination of pain, beauty, struggle, and life. It was a Hegelian dialectic. It was a black whale just as real as Melville's Moby Dick. It still has me firmly in its grip. There are scenes in this book that are burnt into my mind and tattooed on my soul.
]]> The Man in the High Castle 216363
This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.]]> 259 Philip K. Dick 0679740678 Darwin8u 5 "The grasshopper shall be a burden"
-- The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

description

This is one of those weird, unsettling novels that spins your brain in six or seven different directions.

I read this PKD masterpiece almost two months ago, but only just recently returned to review it because after finishing, I wasn't ready to review. After I read more of him, I realized that even when he is messy, strange, disjointed and sometimes yes >>touched<< Philip K Dick is one MuthaF'er that definitely can write and can definitely write his readers into circles. He bends time, switches alliances, inverts us until we find we don't recognize our own reflection or past.

Reading 'The Man in the High Castle', I was reminded of a time when I was in High School in Germany. At the time, I was very flexible (think Abraham Lincoln meets, falls in love, and produces offspring with Gumbi) and decided to jump/fall/roll off the high dive platform with both legs wrapped around my head while standing on my hands. I rolled forward spinning head-chasing-ass (my knees were my axis of rotation) until I hit the water. At that moment my legs seemed to float from my head to their normal bipedal position, but my legs seem to not exist in a normal sense and I had no sense of North, South, Up or Down. It was embryonic and yes probably moronic, but it is exactly how I felt putting this novel down.

Anyway, a fantstic dystopian/alternate history novel that if possible should be read with Philip Roth's also brilliant The Plot Against America. At least that is how I feel now about reading him then, but time has moved on, and I might just be remembering wrong.]]> 3.64 1962 The Man in the High Castle
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2013/10/26
date added: 2018/01/27
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 2013, aere-perennius, scifi, fiction, american
review:
"The grasshopper shall be a burden"
-- The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

description

This is one of those weird, unsettling novels that spins your brain in six or seven different directions.

I read this PKD masterpiece almost two months ago, but only just recently returned to review it because after finishing, I wasn't ready to review. After I read more of him, I realized that even when he is messy, strange, disjointed and sometimes yes >>touched<< Philip K Dick is one MuthaF'er that definitely can write and can definitely write his readers into circles. He bends time, switches alliances, inverts us until we find we don't recognize our own reflection or past.

Reading 'The Man in the High Castle', I was reminded of a time when I was in High School in Germany. At the time, I was very flexible (think Abraham Lincoln meets, falls in love, and produces offspring with Gumbi) and decided to jump/fall/roll off the high dive platform with both legs wrapped around my head while standing on my hands. I rolled forward spinning head-chasing-ass (my knees were my axis of rotation) until I hit the water. At that moment my legs seemed to float from my head to their normal bipedal position, but my legs seem to not exist in a normal sense and I had no sense of North, South, Up or Down. It was embryonic and yes probably moronic, but it is exactly how I felt putting this novel down.

Anyway, a fantstic dystopian/alternate history novel that if possible should be read with Philip Roth's also brilliant The Plot Against America. At least that is how I feel now about reading him then, but time has moved on, and I might just be remembering wrong.
]]> Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Darwin8u 5 “Everything is nothing, with a twist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

description

I've read Slaughterhouse-Five several times and I'm still not sure I know exactly how Vonnegut pulls it off. It is primarily a postmodern, anti-war novel. It is an absurd look at war, memory, time, and humanity, but it is also gentle. Its prose emotionally feels (go ahead, pet the emotion) like the tug of the tides, the heaviness of sleep, the seduction of alcohol, the dizziness of love. His prose is simple, but beautiful.

Obviously, part of the brilliance of this novel is born from the reality that Vonnegut is largely playing the notes of his own song (obviously, obscured by an unreliable narrator, time that is unstuck, and generous kidnapping aliens). It is the song of someone who has seen horrible, horrible things but still wants to dance and smile (so a Totentanz?).

Emperor, your sword won't help you out
Sceptre and crown are worthless here
I've taken you by the hand
For you must come to my dance

I had to work very much and very hard
The sweat was running down my skin
I'd like to escape death nonetheless
But here I won't have any luck

It is essentially art pulled out of the tension between despair and hope, grief and celebration, love and death. It is a classic not because it has a message about war, but because it has a message about life. Vonnegut aimed at war and hit everything. ]]> 4.10 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2017/01/19
date added: 2018/01/27
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem, 2017, aere-perennius, fiction, scifi
review:
“Everything is nothing, with a twist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

description

I've read Slaughterhouse-Five several times and I'm still not sure I know exactly how Vonnegut pulls it off. It is primarily a postmodern, anti-war novel. It is an absurd look at war, memory, time, and humanity, but it is also gentle. Its prose emotionally feels (go ahead, pet the emotion) like the tug of the tides, the heaviness of sleep, the seduction of alcohol, the dizziness of love. His prose is simple, but beautiful.

Obviously, part of the brilliance of this novel is born from the reality that Vonnegut is largely playing the notes of his own song (obviously, obscured by an unreliable narrator, time that is unstuck, and generous kidnapping aliens). It is the song of someone who has seen horrible, horrible things but still wants to dance and smile (so a Totentanz?).

Emperor, your sword won't help you out
Sceptre and crown are worthless here
I've taken you by the hand
For you must come to my dance

I had to work very much and very hard
The sweat was running down my skin
I'd like to escape death nonetheless
But here I won't have any luck

It is essentially art pulled out of the tension between despair and hope, grief and celebration, love and death. It is a classic not because it has a message about war, but because it has a message about life. Vonnegut aimed at war and hit everything.
]]> The Soft Machine 8989800 143 William S. Burroughs 0007341911 Darwin8u 4 2017, 100-mccaffery 'Breathe in Johnny -- Here Goes --'

description

I respect rather than love it. Like Gravity's Rainbow's sewer scene on his knees, bare as a baby ... or William T. Vollmann's telephone exchange between steel reefs, a wire wrapped in gutta-percha vibrates: I hereby...zzZZZZZ...the critical situation...a crushing blow....The sleepwalker's all eyes; the realist is all ears; their mating forms the telephone. Later perhaps, I see parts, flashing, cut-in, from David Lynch this is a formica table or Cronenberg's not naked lunch or beginning of Kubrick's 2001 apes confronted with steel. Celluloid burning. when we came out of the mud we had names. Perhaps, Trump Tweets massacred by homoeroticism: I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke 11:43 AM - 14 Oct 2012. Thinking man's thin man. Marlowe and Philip K Dick detectives utilizing third-person singular indirect recall, though now using the cut-up method, Burroughs unsettles and alarms with images of consumption (not to mention graphic scenes of: sex - drugs - coprophagia - sacrifice - self-abuse). Pan God of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets as the berserk time machine twisted a tornado of years and centuries -- wind through dusty offices and archives -- Late night Trump tweets interrupted because The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences! 6:22 PM - 1 Aug 2014. The time to be Messianic is now. Word Hordes of the World Unite! I feel like I just jumped off a modern Joyce nightmare. Not even my warm bath, diet Coke, Hi-Chew blood sugar highs and restless foot cramps can keep me from the dizzying nature of Wind turbines are ripping [Scotland] apart and killing tourism.Electric bills in Scotland are skyrocketing-stop the madness. ...High on ammonia issuing insane orders... Grammy award goes to Adele 'Song of the Year' HELLO? Reading paperback 3rd edition on back in bath. 'Record of the Year' HELLO? Listening to audiobook of revised edition. 'Best Pop Solo Performance' HELLO? HELLO? HELLO? The inconsistency between editions seems right. Lost seems right. Unsettled seems right. Unfinished loop seems to capture the Burroughs sense of a living text. I'm adrift. Wet certainly. Drowning. Cut the word lines -- Cut the music lines -- Smash the control images -- Smash the control machine -- Burn the books -- Kill the priests --Kill! Kill! Kill!. Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name “F**kface Von Clownstick” like they are so original & like no one else is doing it... 9:35 AM - 3 May 2013. Welcome Mr. President. President Trump welcome to the future. - nothing here now but circling word dust - dead postcard falling through space between world - this road in this sharp spell of carrion -]]> 2.96 1961 The Soft Machine
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 2.96
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2017/02/12
date added: 2017/02/13
shelves: 2017, 100-mccaffery
review:
'Breathe in Johnny -- Here Goes --'

description

I respect rather than love it. Like Gravity's Rainbow's sewer scene on his knees, bare as a baby ... or William T. Vollmann's telephone exchange between steel reefs, a wire wrapped in gutta-percha vibrates: I hereby...zzZZZZZ...the critical situation...a crushing blow....The sleepwalker's all eyes; the realist is all ears; their mating forms the telephone. Later perhaps, I see parts, flashing, cut-in, from David Lynch this is a formica table or Cronenberg's not naked lunch or beginning of Kubrick's 2001 apes confronted with steel. Celluloid burning. when we came out of the mud we had names. Perhaps, Trump Tweets massacred by homoeroticism: I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke 11:43 AM - 14 Oct 2012. Thinking man's thin man. Marlowe and Philip K Dick detectives utilizing third-person singular indirect recall, though now using the cut-up method, Burroughs unsettles and alarms with images of consumption (not to mention graphic scenes of: sex - drugs - coprophagia - sacrifice - self-abuse). Pan God of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets as the berserk time machine twisted a tornado of years and centuries -- wind through dusty offices and archives -- Late night Trump tweets interrupted because The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences! 6:22 PM - 1 Aug 2014. The time to be Messianic is now. Word Hordes of the World Unite! I feel like I just jumped off a modern Joyce nightmare. Not even my warm bath, diet Coke, Hi-Chew blood sugar highs and restless foot cramps can keep me from the dizzying nature of Wind turbines are ripping [Scotland] apart and killing tourism.Electric bills in Scotland are skyrocketing-stop the madness. ...High on ammonia issuing insane orders... Grammy award goes to Adele 'Song of the Year' HELLO? Reading paperback 3rd edition on back in bath. 'Record of the Year' HELLO? Listening to audiobook of revised edition. 'Best Pop Solo Performance' HELLO? HELLO? HELLO? The inconsistency between editions seems right. Lost seems right. Unsettled seems right. Unfinished loop seems to capture the Burroughs sense of a living text. I'm adrift. Wet certainly. Drowning. Cut the word lines -- Cut the music lines -- Smash the control images -- Smash the control machine -- Burn the books -- Kill the priests --Kill! Kill! Kill!. Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name “F**kface Von Clownstick” like they are so original & like no one else is doing it... 9:35 AM - 3 May 2013. Welcome Mr. President. President Trump welcome to the future. - nothing here now but circling word dust - dead postcard falling through space between world - this road in this sharp spell of carrion -
]]> Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down 43017 Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life. In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.]]> 177 Ishmael Reed 1564782387 Darwin8u 5 100-mccaffery, 2016 "All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree."
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

description

Imagine an acid-trip dream that involves Loop Garoo Kid, a bad-ass black cowboy who is a master of Neohoodooism. Set this dream up as a classic Western, invert and twist it, add various funky characters:

1. Bo Schmo, a part-time autocrat monarchist and guru and his neo-socialist realist gang.
2. A touring circus troupe including a dancing bear, the Juggler, and Zozo the palm reader.
3. Chief Showcase, a paternalist Indian.
4. Drag Gibson, the ranch Boss.
5. Pope Innocent, God's fixer.
6. Mustache Sal, a nymphomaniac mail-order-bride.

And many, many more.

Imagine a story that seems like a mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, and Richard Brautigan. In the beginning of the book, Loop tells us:

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” Loop, the protagonist is up against the man, struggling against established religious, economic, and cultural oppressions.

The novel's prose riffs and rolls the narrative with some strange, obscene, smokey combination of Jazz and African-American folk magic. I kept hearing the words in my head as if sung by Sly Stone on peyote in the midst of a vision quest. This is a book that needs to be read it one sitting. It is not casual. It is funny, absurd, strange, twisted, obscene, messy, relevant, infinitely quotable, cheeky, irreverent, subversive, rollicking, and completely woke.]]> 3.79 1969 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
author: Ishmael Reed
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2016/12/10
date added: 2016/12/11
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 2016
review:
"All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree."
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

description

Imagine an acid-trip dream that involves Loop Garoo Kid, a bad-ass black cowboy who is a master of Neohoodooism. Set this dream up as a classic Western, invert and twist it, add various funky characters:

1. Bo Schmo, a part-time autocrat monarchist and guru and his neo-socialist realist gang.
2. A touring circus troupe including a dancing bear, the Juggler, and Zozo the palm reader.
3. Chief Showcase, a paternalist Indian.
4. Drag Gibson, the ranch Boss.
5. Pope Innocent, God's fixer.
6. Mustache Sal, a nymphomaniac mail-order-bride.

And many, many more.

Imagine a story that seems like a mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, and Richard Brautigan. In the beginning of the book, Loop tells us:

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” Loop, the protagonist is up against the man, struggling against established religious, economic, and cultural oppressions.

The novel's prose riffs and rolls the narrative with some strange, obscene, smokey combination of Jazz and African-American folk magic. I kept hearing the words in my head as if sung by Sly Stone on peyote in the midst of a vision quest. This is a book that needs to be read it one sitting. It is not casual. It is funny, absurd, strange, twisted, obscene, messy, relevant, infinitely quotable, cheeky, irreverent, subversive, rollicking, and completely woke.
]]> Winesburg, Ohio 80176 Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.]]> 240 Sherwood Anderson 0192839772 Darwin8u 5 "I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?"
-- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

description

This is one of those important novels I would have probably passed over or missed if Sherwood Anderson wasn't mentioned in so many lists--and if so many authors I admire (Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, O'Connor, McCarthy) didn't mention (or perhaps not mention, but just shadow) him as an influence or inspiration.

There is something beautiful about every single sentence that Anderson writes. Some of the stories in 'Winesburg, Ohio' (Death, Loneliness, the Strength of God, Godliness, and Adventure) were nearly perfect. Others, while they might not have hit me as hard as those five, were still almost uniformly beautiful and interesting. Like waves beating rhythmically against a wall, Anderson's stories seemed to gently deliver a message from the universe of the grotesque. Ideas of isolation, loneliness, love and the need to reach out to others (to find love or understanding) float from one story to the next and weave the various plots of the twenty-two short stories together. 'Winesburg, Ohio' is a great piece of American fiction and an amazing piece of 2oth century art.]]> 3.83 1919 Winesburg, Ohio
author: Sherwood Anderson
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1919
rating: 5
read at: 2013/06/26
date added: 2016/06/26
shelves: 2013, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:
"I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?"
-- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

description

This is one of those important novels I would have probably passed over or missed if Sherwood Anderson wasn't mentioned in so many lists--and if so many authors I admire (Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, O'Connor, McCarthy) didn't mention (or perhaps not mention, but just shadow) him as an influence or inspiration.

There is something beautiful about every single sentence that Anderson writes. Some of the stories in 'Winesburg, Ohio' (Death, Loneliness, the Strength of God, Godliness, and Adventure) were nearly perfect. Others, while they might not have hit me as hard as those five, were still almost uniformly beautiful and interesting. Like waves beating rhythmically against a wall, Anderson's stories seemed to gently deliver a message from the universe of the grotesque. Ideas of isolation, loneliness, love and the need to reach out to others (to find love or understanding) float from one story to the next and weave the various plots of the twenty-two short stories together. 'Winesburg, Ohio' is a great piece of American fiction and an amazing piece of 2oth century art.
]]> The French Lieutenant's Woman 6989218 465 John Fowles Darwin8u 5 “I am infinitely strange to myself.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

description

The reason I am drawn to literature, to art, to books considered to be classics, is to watch some middle-aged, bearded man put on a pair of (excuse the flamboyant analogy) skates and suddenly pitch himself into the center of the ring and pull off a triple Salchow. I love risk-taking, experimental literature. With 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', Fowles is boldly moving in a lot of directions at once (pushing down fourth walls [Chapter 13], jumping forward and backward in time, throwing himself into the path of the protagonist Charles) and manages to control it all with a sharp elegance that is breathtaking.

He (re)creates a Victorian period novel and then deconstructs, dissects and parodies it while we watch. He bends into it elements of Darwinian and Marxist thought (two revolutionary Men who lived during this period, but are never displayed in the works of the Brontës, Hardy, Gaskell, Dickens or Trollope. Doing so, he subverts both the age and the novel. 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' is a work of genius and a book that teased and challenged me on almost every page as I read it. ]]> 3.84 1969 The French Lieutenant's Woman
author: John Fowles
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2013/09/15
date added: 2016/06/10
shelves: 2013, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:
“I am infinitely strange to myself.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

description

The reason I am drawn to literature, to art, to books considered to be classics, is to watch some middle-aged, bearded man put on a pair of (excuse the flamboyant analogy) skates and suddenly pitch himself into the center of the ring and pull off a triple Salchow. I love risk-taking, experimental literature. With 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', Fowles is boldly moving in a lot of directions at once (pushing down fourth walls [Chapter 13], jumping forward and backward in time, throwing himself into the path of the protagonist Charles) and manages to control it all with a sharp elegance that is breathtaking.

He (re)creates a Victorian period novel and then deconstructs, dissects and parodies it while we watch. He bends into it elements of Darwinian and Marxist thought (two revolutionary Men who lived during this period, but are never displayed in the works of the Brontës, Hardy, Gaskell, Dickens or Trollope. Doing so, he subverts both the age and the novel. 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' is a work of genius and a book that teased and challenged me on almost every page as I read it.
]]> <![CDATA[The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 431 The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels – from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel

The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.]]> 308 Paul Auster 0143039830 Darwin8u 3 100-mccaffery, 2013 “The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

description

REVIEW 1: City of Glass

An interesting PoMo novella. Auster's first novel/second book/first of his 'New York Trilogy', 'City of Glass' is simultaneously a detective novel, an exploration of the author/narrative dynamic, and a treatise on language. I liked parts, loved parts, and finished the book thinking the author had written something perhaps more interesting than important.

My favorite parts were the chapters where Auster (actual author Auster) through the narrator Quinn acting as the detective Auster explored Stillman's book: 'The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World'. I also enjoyed the chapter where Auster (character Auster) and Quinn (acting as detective Auster) explored Auster's (character Auster) Don Quixote ideas. Those chapters reminded me obliquely (everything in City of Glass is oblique) of Gaddis.

In the end, however, it all seemed like Auster had read Gaddis wanted to write a PoMo novel to reflect the confusing nature of the author/narrator/translator/editor role(s) of 'Don Quixote', set it all in Manhatten, and wanted to make the prose and story fit within the general framework of a detective novel. He pulled it off and it all kinda worked. I'll say more once I finish the next two of the 'New York Trilogy'.

REVIEW 2: Ghosts

An uncanny valley of Gaddis IMHO. 'Ghosts', the second book in Auster's 'New York Trilogy' reminds me what I both like and don't like about MFA writers. Often clever and grammatically precise but they don't say so much. If they were painters their perspective would be perfect and their posters would sell, but the pigment or texture or something between the edges is just missing that undercurrent of something to give a real shit about.


REVIEW 3: The Locked Room

Not much to add that I haven't already written in my reviews of Auster's first two 'New York Trilogy' novels. In 'The Locked Room' Auster dances with the same themes, with slightly different variations. The novellas are more brothers to each other instead of cousins. In a lot of ways he reminds me of an earlier generations' Dave Eggers. There is definitely a lot of talent latent in the guy. He certainly can write, but unlike Fitzgerald who was able to tell a similar themed story in his novels and still provide weight. I just didn't feel the gravity. It was like Camus couldn't really decide whether to kill the Arab, didn't know if he cared or not, so he just walked around and killed himself but made the Arab watch.

I don't know. That may not be right. I'll probably just delete this review anyway. Only Otis will read it and I've asked him to delete all my reviews he doesn't like anyway. How do I guarantee this? Well, I could talk about Otis. I could tell you that there are things about author Auster, unrelated to his books I just don't like (who lives in NY Anyway?). He is a bad behaving author (untrue). He keeps sending me his manuscripts and wants me to say nice things about his work (untrue). I don't know. Is Auster married? Maybe, I'll go and console his wife now.
]]> 3.93 1987 The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Paul Auster
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2013/10/04
date added: 2016/05/12
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 2013
review:
“The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

description

REVIEW 1: City of Glass

An interesting PoMo novella. Auster's first novel/second book/first of his 'New York Trilogy', 'City of Glass' is simultaneously a detective novel, an exploration of the author/narrative dynamic, and a treatise on language. I liked parts, loved parts, and finished the book thinking the author had written something perhaps more interesting than important.

My favorite parts were the chapters where Auster (actual author Auster) through the narrator Quinn acting as the detective Auster explored Stillman's book: 'The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World'. I also enjoyed the chapter where Auster (character Auster) and Quinn (acting as detective Auster) explored Auster's (character Auster) Don Quixote ideas. Those chapters reminded me obliquely (everything in City of Glass is oblique) of Gaddis.

In the end, however, it all seemed like Auster had read Gaddis wanted to write a PoMo novel to reflect the confusing nature of the author/narrator/translator/editor role(s) of 'Don Quixote', set it all in Manhatten, and wanted to make the prose and story fit within the general framework of a detective novel. He pulled it off and it all kinda worked. I'll say more once I finish the next two of the 'New York Trilogy'.

REVIEW 2: Ghosts

An uncanny valley of Gaddis IMHO. 'Ghosts', the second book in Auster's 'New York Trilogy' reminds me what I both like and don't like about MFA writers. Often clever and grammatically precise but they don't say so much. If they were painters their perspective would be perfect and their posters would sell, but the pigment or texture or something between the edges is just missing that undercurrent of something to give a real shit about.


REVIEW 3: The Locked Room

Not much to add that I haven't already written in my reviews of Auster's first two 'New York Trilogy' novels. In 'The Locked Room' Auster dances with the same themes, with slightly different variations. The novellas are more brothers to each other instead of cousins. In a lot of ways he reminds me of an earlier generations' Dave Eggers. There is definitely a lot of talent latent in the guy. He certainly can write, but unlike Fitzgerald who was able to tell a similar themed story in his novels and still provide weight. I just didn't feel the gravity. It was like Camus couldn't really decide whether to kill the Arab, didn't know if he cared or not, so he just walked around and killed himself but made the Arab watch.

I don't know. That may not be right. I'll probably just delete this review anyway. Only Otis will read it and I've asked him to delete all my reviews he doesn't like anyway. How do I guarantee this? Well, I could talk about Otis. I could tell you that there are things about author Auster, unrelated to his books I just don't like (who lives in NY Anyway?). He is a bad behaving author (untrue). He keeps sending me his manuscripts and wants me to say nice things about his work (untrue). I don't know. Is Auster married? Maybe, I'll go and console his wife now.

]]> The Tunnel 2333381 652 William H. Gass 0060976861 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 4.28 1995 The Tunnel
author: William H. Gass
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2016/04/04
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter]]> 466791 124 Lucien Stryk 0802134076 Darwin8u 4 2015, 100-mccaffery "My hand's the universe,
it can do anything."
- Shinkichi Takahashi

description

A nice survey of Zen poetry from the Southern Sung Dynasty to a segment highlighting Shinkichi Takahashi (who is probably best described as a Contemporary Zen Dadaist). While I can't read Japanese, the translations by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto seem to strike a nice balance between translating the Zen experience of these poems while maintaining the poetic nature of the originals. While previously exposed to a bunch of Basho, Bunan, Issa & Shiki, I wasn't nearly as familiar with Shinkichi Takahashi. Takahashi's poems ALONE make this book worth the dime and time.

description

He seems to bridge the ideas of Zen with a modern atomic energy. Here is an example:

Destruction

The universe is forever falling apart --
No need to push the button,
It collapses at a finger's touch:
Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,
Hordes leap from the tips
Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:
It's in your palm. There's room enough
On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing, the universe:
Here is all strength, here is the greatest strength.
You and the sparrow are one
And, should he wish, he can crush you.
The universe trembles before him.

- Shinkichi Takahashi

]]> 3.87 1988 Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter
author: Lucien Stryk
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2015/08/02
date added: 2016/02/12
shelves: 2015, 100-mccaffery
review:
"My hand's the universe,
it can do anything."
- Shinkichi Takahashi

description

A nice survey of Zen poetry from the Southern Sung Dynasty to a segment highlighting Shinkichi Takahashi (who is probably best described as a Contemporary Zen Dadaist). While I can't read Japanese, the translations by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto seem to strike a nice balance between translating the Zen experience of these poems while maintaining the poetic nature of the originals. While previously exposed to a bunch of Basho, Bunan, Issa & Shiki, I wasn't nearly as familiar with Shinkichi Takahashi. Takahashi's poems ALONE make this book worth the dime and time.

description

He seems to bridge the ideas of Zen with a modern atomic energy. Here is an example:

Destruction

The universe is forever falling apart --
No need to push the button,
It collapses at a finger's touch:
Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,
Hordes leap from the tips
Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:
It's in your palm. There's room enough
On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing, the universe:
Here is all strength, here is the greatest strength.
You and the sparrow are one
And, should he wish, he can crush you.
The universe trembles before him.

- Shinkichi Takahashi


]]> Finnegans Wake 11013
Written in a fantastic dream-language, forged from polyglot puns and portmanteau words, the Wake features some of Joyce's most hilarious characters: the Irish barkeep Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Joyce's final work, Finnegan's Wake is his masterpiece of the night as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream. Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and all official forms of English and confronts the different kinds of betrayal - cultural, political and sexual - that he saw at the heart of Irish history. Dazzlingly inventive, with passages of great lyrical beauty and humour, Finnegans Wake remains one of the most remarkable works of the twentieth century.]]> 628 James Joyce 0571217354 Darwin8u 5 "Wipe your glosses with what you know."

description

I tend never to retread the same book twice. I finish a novel or a book, digest it, then move on. Having just finished 'Finnegans Wake' I'm not sure that approach is even possible. This is a book that is simply impossible to really finish. Yes, I read from the beginning to end. Yes, I listened to it while reading. Yes, I spoke sentences out loud. Yes, I shouted words. Yes, I underlined phrases that tickled and rhymes that ringed. But, I feel like I've scratched the semantic surface of a great field. I'm not sure when I'll return, but I'm pretty certain that the gravity is there. I feel it even as I gladly set this book aside. This is a novel that demands attention. It frustrates and confuses the most diligent seeker. I never felt in control. I never felt in command. I was in the river, and floated for a time and am just happy I didn't drown. It is world I will return to like a dream-filled sleep when the day is done and night returns. ]]> 3.66 1939 Finnegans Wake
author: James Joyce
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2011/03/13
date added: 2016/01/03
shelves: 2011, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:
"Wipe your glosses with what you know."

description

I tend never to retread the same book twice. I finish a novel or a book, digest it, then move on. Having just finished 'Finnegans Wake' I'm not sure that approach is even possible. This is a book that is simply impossible to really finish. Yes, I read from the beginning to end. Yes, I listened to it while reading. Yes, I spoke sentences out loud. Yes, I shouted words. Yes, I underlined phrases that tickled and rhymes that ringed. But, I feel like I've scratched the semantic surface of a great field. I'm not sure when I'll return, but I'm pretty certain that the gravity is there. I feel it even as I gladly set this book aside. This is a novel that demands attention. It frustrates and confuses the most diligent seeker. I never felt in control. I never felt in command. I was in the river, and floated for a time and am just happy I didn't drown. It is world I will return to like a dream-filled sleep when the day is done and night returns.
]]> The Sheltering Sky 243598 The Sheltering Sky is at once merciless and heartbreaking in its compassion. It etches the limits of human reason and intelligence—perhaps even the limits of human life—when they touch the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.]]> 342 Paul Bowles 0141023422 Darwin8u 5 “How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

description

Paul Bowles masterpiece reminds me of some alternate, trippy, version of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, but instead we see the other side of the Mediterranean. Tangier and the deserts of North Africa take the place of the South of France. A different love triangle exposes different forms of loneliness, madness, love, and existential expats.

The thing I love about Bowles is he brings a composer's mind to writing. His novel isn't propelled forward by a strong plot (although it has plot) or attractive characters (none of the characters are very attractive), but the music of his language alone pushes and pulls, tugs and compels the reader page after page. It felt very much like I was floating limp and languid in Bowles prose as his hypnotic sentences washed over me and drifted me slowly toward the inevitable end.

Most days, I don't feel a real need to read a book twice. I might need to make an exception for 'The Sheltering Sky'.]]> 3.92 1949 The Sheltering Sky
author: Paul Bowles
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1949
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/26
date added: 2015/12/20
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 2015
review:
“How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

description

Paul Bowles masterpiece reminds me of some alternate, trippy, version of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, but instead we see the other side of the Mediterranean. Tangier and the deserts of North Africa take the place of the South of France. A different love triangle exposes different forms of loneliness, madness, love, and existential expats.

The thing I love about Bowles is he brings a composer's mind to writing. His novel isn't propelled forward by a strong plot (although it has plot) or attractive characters (none of the characters are very attractive), but the music of his language alone pushes and pulls, tugs and compels the reader page after page. It felt very much like I was floating limp and languid in Bowles prose as his hypnotic sentences washed over me and drifted me slowly toward the inevitable end.

Most days, I don't feel a real need to read a book twice. I might need to make an exception for 'The Sheltering Sky'.
]]> Gravity’s Rainbow 415 776 Thomas Pynchon 0143039946 Darwin8u 5 “I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

description

I personally enjoyed Against the Day more, liked Mason & Dixon better, but think Gravity's Rainbow is the more important. Pynchon definitely belongs on the shelf next to Joyce, Kafka, etc.. There are only a handful of modern writers who belong near him... Roth, McCarthy, DeLillo, DFW (perhaps). Anyway, I started the book in 1993 and stopped after just a couple episodes. I loved it, but wasn't nearly ready. I wasn't close to being prepared. Finished it today. "Tree arising! O pure ascendance!"]]> 4.01 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2011/06/15
date added: 2015/12/16
shelves: 2011, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:
“I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

description

I personally enjoyed Against the Day more, liked Mason & Dixon better, but think Gravity's Rainbow is the more important. Pynchon definitely belongs on the shelf next to Joyce, Kafka, etc.. There are only a handful of modern writers who belong near him... Roth, McCarthy, DeLillo, DFW (perhaps). Anyway, I started the book in 1993 and stopped after just a couple episodes. I loved it, but wasn't nearly ready. I wasn't close to being prepared. Finished it today. "Tree arising! O pure ascendance!"
]]> The Sot-Weed Factor 469361
On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times.]]> 758 John Barth 0385240880 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 4.26 1960 The Sot-Weed Factor
author: John Barth
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/12/05
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> Pale Fire 499933 315 Vladimir Nabokov 0679723420 Darwin8u 5 “All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

description

One of the funniest, most absurdly brilliant books I've ever read. I find it amazing that Nabokov would have written this novel (which oddly is a haunting retelling of my life story) without mentioning me by name at all. There must be a reason for this. Perhaps Nabokov was trying to not just protect me, but my whole family from the fame and pain that would no doubt have accompanied the public's inquisitiveness and the critics' vampirism if this information had been made plain and obvious. That is what I love about Nabokov. He is a gentle ghost of a poet that exists in many levels and in many times and in many spaces simultaneously. I think his integrity in lying about and hiding my influence is both beautiful and nobel and certainly shaking with a heterosexual, Russian poet's naiveté.]]> 4.21 1962 Pale Fire
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2012/04/14
date added: 2015/11/11
shelves: 2012, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:
“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

description

One of the funniest, most absurdly brilliant books I've ever read. I find it amazing that Nabokov would have written this novel (which oddly is a haunting retelling of my life story) without mentioning me by name at all. There must be a reason for this. Perhaps Nabokov was trying to not just protect me, but my whole family from the fame and pain that would no doubt have accompanied the public's inquisitiveness and the critics' vampirism if this information had been made plain and obvious. That is what I love about Nabokov. He is a gentle ghost of a poet that exists in many levels and in many times and in many spaces simultaneously. I think his integrity in lying about and hiding my influence is both beautiful and nobel and certainly shaking with a heterosexual, Russian poet's naiveté.
]]> Their Eyes Were Watching God 178805 219 Zora Neale Hurston 0060931418 Darwin8u 4 100-mccaffery 3.90 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/07/25
shelves: 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Tropic of Cancer 6035 Tropic of Cancer is an extravagant and rhapsodic hymn to a world of unrivalled sexuality and freedom.

With an essay by James Frey

'A momentous event in the history of modern writing'
Samuel Beckett]]> 336 Henry Miller 0007204469 Darwin8u 4
This is one of those amazing books that does violence to your system (think Lolita, Naked Lunch, Ulysses) but still leaves you gobsmacked by its brilliance. IT is the brazen, tortured soul of a man going through an existential crises in Paris. The novel is a cry in the dark; a delirious shout in the void. Miller's prose dances on the edge of the cracked mirror of Modernism. It is dazzling, sharp and extremely dangerous.

This is NOT a novel for the weak, the timid, the easily shocked or those that believe art exists without shadows. Miller lifts the sheets and describes the decay, the despair and the rot of humanity. If you are not prepared for the monstrous vision of Miller you won't be able to find the roses in the dung heap, and thus you will be unable to question your own desire for roses in the first place.]]> 3.67 1934 Tropic of Cancer
author: Henry Miller
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1934
rating: 4
read at: 2012/11/10
date added: 2015/05/05
shelves: 2012, 100-modern-library, 100-mccaffery
review:
“When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”

This is one of those amazing books that does violence to your system (think Lolita, Naked Lunch, Ulysses) but still leaves you gobsmacked by its brilliance. IT is the brazen, tortured soul of a man going through an existential crises in Paris. The novel is a cry in the dark; a delirious shout in the void. Miller's prose dances on the edge of the cracked mirror of Modernism. It is dazzling, sharp and extremely dangerous.

This is NOT a novel for the weak, the timid, the easily shocked or those that believe art exists without shadows. Miller lifts the sheets and describes the decay, the despair and the rot of humanity. If you are not prepared for the monstrous vision of Miller you won't be able to find the roses in the dung heap, and thus you will be unable to question your own desire for roses in the first place.
]]> Wise Blood 48467 This is an alternate-cover edition for ISBN 9780374530631)

The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.

This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.]]> 256 Flannery O'Connor 0374530637 Darwin8u 5 3.84 1952 Wise Blood
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2012/10/17
date added: 2014/01/01
shelves: 2012, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:
Holy crap and profit! I think Flannery O'Connor could go 10 rounds with Cormac McCarthy and still end with a draw. Wise Blood is an amazing look at sin, heresy, apostasy and redemption(?). No. Redemption might just be too hopeful for this O'Connor. Wise Blood is an amazing reworking of several of her shorter stories, but where this novel might have ended up as some Frankensteinian monster in lesser hands, Wise Blood pulls it off. It is a monster for sure, but you never should confuse a grotesque Southern Gothic masterpiece with a deformed literary Prometheus. This novel is amazing.
]]> American Psycho 28676 American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.]]> 399 Bret Easton Ellis 0679735771 Darwin8u 0 3.81 1991 American Psycho
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/09/22
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dubliners (English and Spanish Edition)]]> 606912 'When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years,' James Joyce once wrote to his brother, 'that it is the "second" city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world'

In Dubliners, completed when Joyce was only twenty-five, he produced a definitive group portrait. It is a book, as Terence Brown suggests in his stimulating Introduction, 'rooted in an intensely accurate apprehension of the detail of Dublin life.' Extensive notes to this new edition fill in the rich network of local and historical references. And yet, beyond its brilliant and almost brutal realism, it is also a book full of enigmas, ambiguities and symbolic resonances. Dubliners remains an undisputed masterpiece, a work that, in Brown's words, 'compels attention by the power of its unique vision of the world, its controlling sense of the truths of human experience as its author discerned them in a defeated, colonial city'.

]]> 317 James Joyce 0140185542 Darwin8u 4 2012, 100-mccaffery 3.93 1914 Dubliners (English and Spanish Edition)
author: James Joyce
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1914
rating: 4
read at: 2012/02/05
date added: 2013/09/22
shelves: 2012, 100-mccaffery
review:
Amazing the depth Joyce had at 25. This man began where many writers can only hope and dream of ending. There are stories in here I've read many many times (the Dead, Araby) and others that for whatever reason I had missed before. A beautifully executed fugue on a city.
]]> The Day of the Locust 113441 The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their by their own desires -- from the ironically romantic artist narrator, to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.]]> 208 Nathanael West 0451523482 Darwin8u 5 This is where the world ends
This is where the world ends
In a poisoned meringue of L.A.'s winter.

End of the World

This book has amazing characters, incredible scenes, and breaks my heart with every page. It set the scene for every David Lynch movie grotesque and the soundtrack for every Pixies song your head can bend itself around. Also, the best cock fight scene in all of literature.]]> 3.74 1939 The Day of the Locust
author: Nathanael West
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2013/09/20
date added: 2013/09/22
shelves: 100-modern-library, 100-mccaffery, aere-perennius, 2013
review:
This is where the world ends
This is where the world ends
This is where the world ends
In a poisoned meringue of L.A.'s winter.

End of the World

This book has amazing characters, incredible scenes, and breaks my heart with every page. It set the scene for every David Lynch movie grotesque and the soundtrack for every Pixies song your head can bend itself around. Also, the best cock fight scene in all of literature.
]]> Midnight’s Children 14836 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’ s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.]]> 647 Salman Rushdie 0099578514 Darwin8u 5 3.98 1981 Midnight’s Children
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/09/05
shelves: aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> To the Lighthouse 59716
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.]]> 209 Virginia Woolf Darwin8u 5 3.81 1927 To the Lighthouse
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1927
rating: 5
read at: 2010/09/13
date added: 2013/09/05
shelves: 2010, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]]> 965469 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the story of Stephen Dedalus, a young man struggling to decide between a religious vocation and an artistic one. The aftermath of the struggle that is so poignantly and unflinchingly recorded forms a large part of the story of Joyce's masterwork, Ulysses, in which Stephen reappears as a main character. ]]> 224 James Joyce 0140283285 Darwin8u 5 3.64 1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
author: James Joyce
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1916
rating: 5
read at: 2011/03/26
date added: 2013/09/05
shelves: 2011, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:
Joyce is otherworldly. It is hard to even judge his early stuff against itself. He seems to have been born a master of language and art. Most authors would be happy to end their careers with 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' For Joyce, these are just the beginning. Anyway, I loved it all.
]]> A Passage to India 1163370 293 E.M. Forster 0679405496 Darwin8u 4 3.91 1924 A Passage to India
author: E.M. Forster
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1924
rating: 4
read at: 2011/04/03
date added: 2013/09/05
shelves: 2011, 100-modern-library, 100-mccaffery, 1001-ante-mortem
review:
A beautiful fugue on the challenges and difficulties of keeping friendships and relationships intact with the constraints of multiple cultures. Harmony is difficult with an echo.
]]> Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1) 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]> 325 Toni Morrison Darwin8u 5 3.97 1987 Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)
author: Toni Morrison
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2011/01/20
date added: 2013/09/03
shelves: 2011, 100-mccaffery, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> Heart of Darkness 4900 Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in “one of the darkest places on earth.” Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.

A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.]]> 188 Joseph Conrad 1892295490 Darwin8u 5 3.43 1899 Heart of Darkness
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1899
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/09/02
shelves: 100-modern-library, 100-mccaffery, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> On the Road 70401 307 Jack Kerouac 0140042598 Darwin8u 4 3.63 1957 On the Road
author: Jack Kerouac
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/09/02
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> The Sun Also Rises 3876 The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.]]> 189 Ernest Hemingway Darwin8u 5 3.81 1926 The Sun Also Rises
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1926
rating: 5
read at: 2011/02/16
date added: 2013/08/29
shelves: 2011, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> A Clockwork Orange 227463 A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. And when the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?"

This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."]]> 192 Anthony Burgess Darwin8u 5 3.98 1962 A Clockwork Orange
author: Anthony Burgess
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/08/29
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> Lolita 7604 Librarian's note: Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141182537.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.]]> 368 Vladimir Nabokov Darwin8u 5 3.87 1955 Lolita
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/08/29
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> Catch-22 168668
Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller’s personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.]]> 453 Joseph Heller 0684833395 Darwin8u 5 3.99 1961 Catch-22
author: Joseph Heller
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2012/02/04
date added: 2013/08/29
shelves: 2012, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:
It was a better book before I read it. Before, it was infinitely absurd. After, it was only absolutely absurd. Obviously, infinite is greater than absolute. This book has been diminished by my reading it.
]]> The Grapes of Wrath 4395 The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

First published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is perhaps the most American of American Classics.]]> 455 John Steinbeck Darwin8u 4 3.88 1939 The Grapes of Wrath
author: John Steinbeck
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/14
date added: 2013/08/29
shelves: 2011, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:
I'm glad I waited to read this until I was in my late 30s, with kids, during the Great Recession and OWS.
]]> Brave New World 5129 Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New Worldd likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

"Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune]]> 268 Aldous Huxley 0060929871 Darwin8u 4 3.99 1932 Brave New World
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1932
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/08/29
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919–2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Darwin8u 5 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/08/29
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> Omensetter's Luck 4049240 304 William H. Gass 0452257859 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 4.21 1966 Omensetter's Luck
author: William H. Gass
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/20
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> Darconville's Cat 2231561
Darconville’s Cat is a novel about love and hate. Among other matters, it deals with delicate tensions between Life and Art, the Ideal and the Real, God and Satan, and, above all, with the crises and conflicts between Man and Woman, the tragic implications of which reach all the way back to the Primal Fall.

Its chapters embody a multiplicity of narrative forms, including a diary, a formal oration, an abecedarium, a sermon, a litany, a blank-verse play, poems, essays, parodies, and fables. It is an explosion of vocabulary, rich with comic invention and dark with infernal imagination.

Alexander Theroux restores words to life, invents others, liberates a language too long polluted by mutters and mumbles, anti-logic, and the inexact lunacies of the modern world where the possibility of communication itself is in question. An elegantly executed jailbreak from the ordinary, Darconville’s Cat is excessive; funny; uncompromising; a powerful epic, coming out of a tradition, yet contempo- rary, of both the sacred and the profane.]]> 704 Alexander Theroux 038515951X Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 4.55 1981 Darconville's Cat
author: Alexander Theroux
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/20
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> Women in Love 602534 544 D.H. Lawrence 0451525914 Darwin8u 0 2.94 1920 Women in Love
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 2.94
book published: 1920
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/19
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, to-read
review:

]]> 1984 5470 328 George Orwell Darwin8u 5 4.15 1949 1984
author: George Orwell
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/08/19
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> Native Son 15622 504 Richard Wright Darwin8u 4 4.03 1940 Native Son
author: Richard Wright
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1940
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/08/19
shelves: 100-modern-library, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> The House of Mirth 267297 350 Edith Wharton 0451527569 Darwin8u 0 3.89 1905 The House of Mirth
author: Edith Wharton
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1905
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/19
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, to-read
review:

]]> The Great Gatsby 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Darwin8u 5 3.93 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library, 1001-ante-mortem
review:

]]> The Ambassadors 775366 The Ambassadors is a novel by Henry James, originally published as a serial in the North American Review (NAR).

Story:
Concerned that her son Chad may have become involved with a woman of dubious reputation, the formidable Mrs. Newsome sends her 'ambassador' Strether from Massachusetts to Paris to extricate him. Strether's mission, however, is gradually undermined as he falls under the spell of the city and finds Chad refined rather than corrupted by its influence and that of his charming companion, the comtesse de Vionnet. As the summer wears on, Mrs. Newsome comes to the conclusion that she must send another envoy to Paris to confront the errant Chad, and a Strether whose view of the world has changed profoundly.
The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view.

Extract:
After the opera, Strether tells Chad why he has come to Paris. However, as he speaks, Strether finds himself less certain of his stance. Chad, once callow and juvenile, now seems confident and restrained. His new personality impresses Strether, who wonders what—or who—has caused Chad’s transformation. Chad asks Strether to stay and meet his close friends, a mother and a daughter, who are arriving in a few days time. Strether, wondering if one of these women has been the impetus for Chad’s improvement, and assuming the daughter to be Chad’s lover, agrees to stay. Meanwhile, Bilham convinces Strether that Chad has a “virtuous attachment”—and that Chad’s relationship with the mysterious woman is innocent. Strether eventually meets the women, Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, Jeanne, at a high society party, but he does not see them long enough to cement an impression. After the brief introduction to Madame de Vionnet, Strether finds himself alone with little Bilham. Strether takes the opportunity to offer Bilham some sage advice: live all you can before it is too late. This advice exposes Strether’s own change since coming to Europe. In Paris, he feels renewed, young again, doubly alive. Over...]]> 528 Henry James 0140432337 Darwin8u 0 3.66 1903 The Ambassadors
author: Henry James
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1903
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:

]]> Under the Volcano 31072
Under the Volcano remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.]]> 423 Malcolm Lowry 0060955228 Darwin8u 5 3.78 1947 Under the Volcano
author: Malcolm Lowry
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1947
rating: 5
read at: 2010/12/02
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 2010, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:

]]> The Sound and the Fury 17176 The Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, is perhaps William Faulkner’s greatest book. It was immediately praised for its innovative narrative technique, and comparisons were made with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, but it did not receive popular acclaim until the late forties, shortly before Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
 
The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of the idiot Benjy and his brothers, Quentin and Jason.

Featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson, this edition follows the text corrected in 1984 by Faulkner expert Noel Polk and corresponds as closely as possible to the author’s original intentions. Included also is the appendix that Faulkner wrote for The Portable Faulkner in 1946, which he called the “key to the whole book.”]]> 368 William Faulkner 0679600175 Darwin8u 5 3.88 1929 The Sound and the Fury
author: William Faulkner
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2011/03/18
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 2011, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:
It is sad to admit that I'm 36, own a bunch of Faulkner novels, always intended to read Faulkner - but until today never actually did. My reading calendar seems to be built backwards. I loved McCarthy so much and every review talked about how he was the modern incantation of Faulkner, so I figured Hell...might as well give the big F a try. Anyway, 'Sound and the Fury' is/was amazing. The fragmented and often unreliable narratives become easier to manage once I got a sense of what Faulkner was doing (or trying to do). Setting this book down, I'd probably say I was most affected by the 2nd section from Quentin's perspective. I loved the imagery. I loved the image of the sad ticking of the watch with hands twisted off and broken crystal, his walk with his shadow and the sunlight, the little Italian girl scene. Faulkner's command of language is fantastic and that seems still to be not enough praise.
]]> An American Tragedy 331319
Based on an actual criminal case, 'An American Tragedy' was the inspiration for the film 'A Place in the Sun', which won six Academy Awards and starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.]]> 859 Theodore Dreiser 0451527704 Darwin8u 0 3.96 1925 An American Tragedy
author: Theodore Dreiser
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1925
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:

]]> Ulysses 763241 Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.]]> 783 James Joyce 0679600116 Darwin8u 5 4.03 1922 Ulysses
author: James Joyce
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2011/06/22
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 2011, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:
Favorite episodes: Episode 3, Proteus; Episode 11, Sirens; Episode 17, Ithaca. I can't imagine how this must have exploded in the early 20th Century.
]]> The Naked and the Dead 12467
Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.]]> 721 Norman Mailer 0312265050 Darwin8u 0 3.94 1948 The Naked and the Dead
author: Norman Mailer
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:

]]> <![CDATA[U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money]]> 261441 U.S.A.trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics.

A startling range of experimental devices captures the textures and background noises of 20th-century life: "Newsreels" with blaring headlines; autobiographical "Camera Eye" sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness; "biographies" evoking emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen, and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling power, tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the Depression.

The U.S.A. trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. Their crisscrossing destinies take in wars and revolutions, desperate love affairs and harrowing family crises, corrupt public triumphs and private catastrophes, in settings that include the trenches of World War I, insurgent Mexico, Hollywood studios in the silent era, Wall Street boardrooms, and the tumultuous streets of Boston just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.]]> 1288 John Dos Passos 1883011140 Darwin8u 0 4.11 1930 U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money
author: John Dos Passos
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1930
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery, 100-modern-library
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable]]> 12279 512 Samuel Beckett 0375400702 Darwin8u 5 100-mccaffery 4.29 1958 Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2011/11/11
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Hogg 85865 The classic and controversial novel made available again; Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, bestselling and award-winning SF author Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America's most famous 'unpublishable' novels. The subject matter of Hogg is our culture of sexual violence and degeneration. Delany explores his disturbing protagonist Hogg on his own turf - rape, pederasty, sexual excess - exposing an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave but necessary book.

A shocking and contemporary insight into a parallel world of sex and cravings that lies in wait in the shadows of our own world.

]]> 288 Samuel R. Delany 147210594X Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 2.91 1994 Hogg
author: Samuel R. Delany
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 2.91
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> In Memoriam to Identity 146899 272 Kathy Acker 080213579X Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.84 1990 In Memoriam to Identity
author: Kathy Acker
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Tours of the Black Clock 7839 320 Steve Erickson 074326570X Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.02 1989 Tours of the Black Clock
author: Steve Erickson
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Easy Travel to Other Planets 657138 278 Ted Mooney 0679738835 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.71 1981 Easy Travel to Other Planets
author: Ted Mooney
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Look Homeward, Angel 12448 544 Thomas Wolfe 0743297318 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.92 1929 Look Homeward, Angel
author: Thomas Wolfe
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1929
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Mulligan Stew 155159 446 Gilbert Sorrentino 1564780872 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.83 1979 Mulligan Stew
author: Gilbert Sorrentino
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> More Than Human 541024
In this genre-bending novel—among the first to have launched sci-fi into the arena of literature—one of the great imaginers of the twentieth century tells a story as mind-blowing as any controlled substance and as affecting as a glimpse into a stranger's soul. For as the protagonists of More Than Human struggle to find who they are and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it. Theodore Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging, with suspense, pathos, and a lyricism rarely seen in science fiction.]]> 186 Theodore Sturgeon 0375703713 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.95 1953 More Than Human
author: Theodore Sturgeon
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Waiting for the Barbarians 838250
J.M. Coetzee's second prize-winning novel is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.]]> 156 J.M. Coetzee 0140065555 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery 4.11 1980 Waiting for the Barbarians
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Creamy & Delicious 3610152 204 Steve Katz Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.19 1970 Creamy & Delicious
author: Steve Katz
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.19
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.]]> 156192 256 Robert Coover 0452260302 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 3.86 1968 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
author: Robert Coover
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American Fiction)]]> 45633 You Bright and Risen Angels is the work of an extraordinary imagination. In this free-wheeling novel of epic proportions, William T. Vollmann has crafted a biting, hilarious satire of history, technology, politics, and misguided love.]]> 635 William T. Vollmann 0140110879 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.04 1987 You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American Fiction)
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Up 709796 330 Ronald Sukenick 1573660450 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.68 1968 Up
author: Ronald Sukenick
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Legs 90761 Legs, the inaugural book in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond.  Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond’s attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.]]> 320 William Kennedy 0140064842 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.81 1975 Legs
author: William Kennedy
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1)]]> 60211 262 Gene Wolfe 0671540661 Darwin8u 5 2012, 100-mccaffery The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, however, is genre fiction at its finest. Original, difficult and well-crafted, it is easy to see how Wolfe is regarded as a writer's writer.]]> 3.86 1980 The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1)
author: Gene Wolfe
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2012/02/25
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 2012, 100-mccaffery
review:
I am almost anti-fantasy. I find most derivative at best and banal to the extreme. Wolfe's first book in his famous The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, however, is genre fiction at its finest. Original, difficult and well-crafted, it is easy to see how Wolfe is regarded as a writer's writer.
]]> Pricksongs and Descants 156194 ]]> 256 Robert Coover 0802136672 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 3.76 1969 Pricksongs and Descants
author: Robert Coover
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> Tlooth 267433 177 Harry Mathews 1564781941 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.81 1966 Tlooth
author: Harry Mathews
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> The Age of Wire and String 155677 The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.]]> 160 Ben Marcus 1564781968 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.70 1995 The Age of Wire and String
author: Ben Marcus
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Infinite Jest 6759
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1088 David Foster Wallace Darwin8u 5
I'll review later. Need to decompress. ]]> 4.26 1996 Infinite Jest
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2012/09/19
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 2012, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:


I'll review later. Need to decompress.
]]> Skinny Legs and All 9370 422 Tom Robbins 1842430343 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.07 1990 Skinny Legs and All
author: Tom Robbins
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> The Franchiser 356205 342 Stanley Elkin 1564783057 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.99 1976 The Franchiser
author: Stanley Elkin
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Go in Beauty (A Zia Book) 789392 286 William Eastlake 0826305385 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.94 1956 Go in Beauty (A Zia Book)
author: William Eastlake
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Riddley Walker 776573 256 Russell Hoban 0253212340 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.03 1980 Riddley Walker
author: Russell Hoban
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Cane 765172 Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.
]]> 116 Jean Toomer 0871401517 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.86 1923 Cane
author: Jean Toomer
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1923
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Red Harvest (The Continental Op #1)]]> 30005
The Op was in Personville, derogatory nickname aside, as the result of a letter to the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco from Donald Willsson, publisher of the local paper, asking for an agent to visit. No other information. As soon as the OP arrives, the body count begins and it starts with his client!

'Red Harvest' is more than a superb crime novel; it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in America and one of the greats of 20th century literature.

Librarian's note #1: this entry relates to the novel 'Red Harvest.' Collections, and other Hammett stories can be found elsewhere on 카지노싸이트.

Librarian's note #2: the two serialized novels are: 1. The Cleansing of Poisonville (which later became Red Harvest), and 2. The Dain Curse.

Librarian's note #3: there are a total of 28 Continental Op short stories plus one incomplete; they can be found by searching GR for: 'a Continental Op Short Story.' They are: 1. Arson Plus, 2. Crooked Souls, 3. Slippery Fingers, 4. It, 5. Bodies Piled Up, 6. The Tenth Clew, 7. Night Shots, 8. Zigzags of Treachery, 9. One Hour, 10. The House on Turk Street, 11. The Girl with the Silver Eyes, 12. Women, Politics & Murder, 13. The Golden Horseshoe, 14. Who Killed Bob Teal? 15. Mike or Alec or Rufus, 16. The Whosis Kid, 17. The Scorched Face, 18. Corkscrew, 19. Dead Yellow Women, 20. The Gutting of Couffignal, 21. Creeping Siamese, 22. The Big Knock-Over, 23. $106,000 Blood Money, 24. The Main Death, 25. This King Business, 26. Fly Paper, 27. The Farewell Murder, 28. Death and Company and, 29. Three Dimes (unfinished).]]> 215 Dashiell Hammett 0752852612 Darwin8u 4 2011, 100-mccaffery 3.97 1929 Red Harvest (The Continental Op #1)
author: Dashiell Hammett
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2011/01/22
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 2011, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> The Golden Notebook 896400 576 Doris Lessing 0586089233 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.79 1962 The Golden Notebook
author: Doris Lessing
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Always Coming Home 201901 Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers. More than five years in creation, it is a novel unlike any other.

A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast. The author makes the inhabitants of the valley as familiar, as immediate, as wholly human as our own friends or family.

Spiraling outward from the dramatic life story of a woman called Stone Telling, Le Guin's Always Coming Home interweaves wry wit, deep insight and extraordinary compassion into a compelling unity of vision.]]> 525 Ursula K. Le Guin 0520227352 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 4.06 1985 Always Coming Home
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> Housekeeping 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.82 1980 Housekeeping
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> The Cannibal 587678 195 John Hawkes 0811200639 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 3.79 1949 The Cannibal
author: John Hawkes
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Darwin8u 5 4.18 1985 Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2010/12/18
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 2010, aere-perennius, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Double or Nothing 266756 Double or Nothing is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions.

Madly transfixing details—noodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars—become milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman's feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel of literary discourse ever presented. Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting.

Picked for American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels

 ]]> 268 Raymond Federman 1573660752 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.03 1971 Double or Nothing
author: Raymond Federman
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Genoa: A Telling of Wonders 1047308 208 Paul Metcalf 0826313000 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.26 1965 Genoa: A Telling of Wonders
author: Paul Metcalf
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Crash 70241 Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.]]> 224 J.G. Ballard 0312420331 Darwin8u 4 100-mccaffery 3.62 1973 Crash
author: J.G. Ballard
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Lookout Cartridge 888887 531 Joseph McElroy 1585673528 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.10 1974 Lookout Cartridge
author: Joseph McElroy
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> The Stain 379260 223 Rikki Ducornet 1564780856 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 3.90 1984 The Stain
author: Rikki Ducornet
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> Dhalgren 85867
Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid.

Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.]]> 801 Samuel R. Delany 0375706682 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.78 1975 Dhalgren
author: Samuel R. Delany
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics)]]> 143170
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 451 Donald Barthelme 0142437395 Darwin8u 0 100-mccaffery, to-read 4.22 1981 Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics)
author: Donald Barthelme
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: 100-mccaffery, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Rifles: A Book of North American Landscapes]]> 841192 411 William T. Vollmann 0670848565 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.10 1994 The Rifles: A Book of North American Landscapes
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories]]> 152653 First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

]]> 240 William H. Gass 0879233745 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.03 1968 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories
author: William H. Gass
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/08/18
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review:

]]> Going Native 14326 320 Stephen Wright 140007942X Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.64 1994 Going Native
author: Stephen Wright
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> Take It or Leave It 266753 456 Raymond Federman 1573660302 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.86 1981 Take It or Leave It
author: Raymond Federman
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

]]> The Making of Americans 58367 The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.]]> 926 Gertrude Stein Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 3.57 1925 The Making of Americans
author: Gertrude Stein
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1925
rating: 0
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shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
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]]> The Public Burning 156198 544 Robert Coover 0802135277 Darwin8u 0 to-read, 100-mccaffery 4.01 1977 The Public Burning
author: Robert Coover
name: Darwin8u
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/08/18
shelves: to-read, 100-mccaffery
review:

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