much is afoot, you guys. THUNDERTOME, secret project, and GRAVITY'S RAINBeh posts are all on the horizon; until they rear their ugly heads, here's (an extremely mixed metaphor and) a big ol' photo of joe on our roof.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 what is the greatest beer of all time?
02 what would you serve at an incubus viewing party?
03 gozer or skelephone?
04 i'm new to this grown-up group vacation thing. pointers? i'm not bringing any firearms or explosive secrets from my past.
VICTOR: i'd rather have in the woods in my purse, but tree of smoke's still king of the shelf.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 wire-watchers, which was your favorite season?
02 what's your personal late-night-at-the-office record? i'm now at a quarter past midnight, but i'm stepping up for another go tonight, i think.
03 how was your weekend? i've missed you guys, what with the office eating my life.
*previous battle here.
**if you've spent time in oxford and aren't yet watching inspector lewis, incidentally, get on that.
***the best season, for my money.
As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do--as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro--to and fro. If, at this moment in time, Twisted River also appeared restless, even impatient, maybe the river itself wanted the boy's body to move on, too--move on, too.i could have set the book down against the wall, reader, the blood would have rushed to my head with a roar, and sweet darkness would have supplanted the bizarro-heroic couplets - i considered it frequently.
VICTOR: while i'm tempted to say that i'd like to see johnson face irving in person, the latter was a wrestler and the former was a heroin addict; it mightn't be pretty. let's say instead that in thundertome, at least, tree of smoke freckles the arena with last night in twisted river.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 which irving novels, if any, have you read? which, if any, did you like?
02 do you find it annoying that irving can't stop talking about screenplay oscars?
03 what would your homeric epithet be?
04 what am i missing about john irving? i like you, and some of you like him, and - help me.
*previous battle here.
**it's true! right before moving here i saw three at once.
Lavishly talented as both a storyteller and a prose stylist, [David Mitchell] is notable for his skill and his fertility. Without annoying zaniness or exaggeration, he is nevertheless an artist of surplus: he seems to have more stories than he quite knows what to do with, and he ranges across a remarkable variety of genres—conventional historical fiction, dystopian sci-fi, literary farce."the opposite...of paul auster" is a provocative phrase; by the time i finished the piece and started calling around to secure a copy of mitchell's black swan green (his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel), his back catalog was sold out all over the city. the lincoln center barnes and noble** claimed to have a copy of number9dream (the 'dystopian sci-fi' woods mentions), so i scooted uptown on my lunch break and made it mine. i wasn't actively looking for a shimmering summer book to counteract denis johnson's tree of smoke, but i found one.
[...]
This is the opposite of the weak postmodernism of a writer like Paul Auster, whose moments of metafictional self-consciousness—“Look, it’s all made up!”—are weightless, because the fictions themselves have failed to achieve substance: a diet going on a diet.
I emerge into a library-study with the highest book-population density I have seen in my life. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side-streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Paperback books, hardcover books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo in, and then to hide the igloo. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too.literary ventriloquism has its drawbacks; Writing Like Murakami, even when one does it very, very well, means giving us constant reminders that we're reading fiction. mitchell counteracts that buzzkill by making his characters more forthcoming than murakami's; because eiji's emotions feel real, it matters less that he himself is awfully implausible. number9dream isn't a perfect book, but it's a wonderful one; i finally did get my hands on a copy of black swan green, and i can't wait to get started on it.
[...]
Pithecanthropus readied himself to defend his friend, but the hellhounds turned and bounded away over the blank margins until they were but blots on the wizened horizon. "Well!" exclaimed Mrs. Comb. She then recalled that she was nesting in the arms of an extinct biped. "Put me down this very instant, you muckster!"
[...]
"People want their comic strips and bedtime stories. Look...a dragonfly. The old poet-monks used to know what week of what month it was, just by the color and sheen of dragonflies'--how'dyacall'em?--fuselages."
[...]
I smoke one, two, three. The cloud atlas turns its pages over. Crows dissect a pile of trash. Tokyo is the color of a dirty eraser.
VICTOR: mitchell's fancy footwork at the expense of lethal force leaves him vulnerable. tree of smoke thugs on.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 has a hot literary profile ever shoved you out the door to hunt an author down?
02 what's your take on murakami?
03 extended dream sequences: refreshing or annoying?
04 have you read anything fantastically summery lately?
*previous battle here.
**while i do most of my shopping at independent bookstores, the local blood bank sent me a b&n gift card; i'm only human.