A Box of Blogposts

Finished this book a while back. Debriefing posts would be a lot more common if I weren't trying to maintain a structure at the moment. Eventually I'd love to push these out there for every book I've read, but perhaps they'd be better suited to be passed out through my tumblr, being only simple thoughts rather than these long unnecessary pages I write here. Then I guess I would be doing the same thing, setting aside a few books to write about here.

The Frog Hospital

Both Tao Lin and Bret Easton Ellis read Lorrie Moore books. I was at a book sale where these huge bags full were a dollar. I saw a Lorrie Moore book. I've read it since. It was, as expected, an experience. I'm not sure how to keep writing in this sort of concise, lame, entirely uninteresting tone. I'm afraid it's my normal voice.

Peter's Mulligan or On Milligan

This will be a bit of an odd one for "debriefing" (have I always put them in quotes? I don't remember...I might have to go and check someday when I care). We are at the end of comix week. Applause from the nonexistent masses who think this whole week has been a waste and nothing from the nonexistent masses who didn't care; it's kind of a you take two halves of infinity and they're both infinity sort of thing only with zeros. This is a reflection on the Peter Milligan issues that my dad had and that I've read. I'm through most of them now but I've got a few set out for the weekend. But if you want to hear more you'll have to follow me after the jump...

Where did she go? Out. What did she do? Everything...

(title is a slogan on the back of The Ballad of Halo Jones)

What my family vacation going on a month back now turned out to be besides its eponymous description was a good deal of both book gathering and reading. I finished The Ballad of Halo Jones, Pale Fire, The Storyteller, and Maps & Legends, all books I had started reading at one point and eventually put down. I don't think I read books the same way very many people do. Anyways, this is debriefing, and this is comics week, so here's a bit on Alan Moore and Ian Gibson's Halo Jones.

Praying in Common

Joan Didion is my favorite female author. While reading a Didion book I often think she's the best writer in English that I've read. When reading a DeLillo book she can fall back to second. Bret Easton Ellis is my favorite, but he's influenced by both DeLillo and Didion and you can feel a sort of authenticity to their work that I think makes their writing stronger, if not for me more personally enjoyable. This is the debriefing of A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's third, but it also acts as a commentary on all the Didion I've read (Play It as It Lays,  Democracy, and The Year of Magical Thinking). After the jump, I plan to consider what a bibliography is supposed to look like, what we want from novels, and what writing novels is like.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

This is another new idea for the blog. I'm calling it "debriefing." I've written stuff to comment on, explain to myself, write about, toy with, and explore the stuff I've been reading for quite a long time. This is the latest installment. But the good thing is that I've always written with the nonexistent audience motif, so at least this time there is the possibility that someone might read this. That seems more sane than talking to your imaginary friends about how they are imaginary. So the book I'm going to write about here is... Not Pale Fire. I bet you were expecting that one. Actually, I think that will come later. I might even write another style and design post about the book first. No, this one is about the Mario Vargas Llosa novel The Storyteller. (Which is quoted in the title if you don't believe me.)