Reading
Reading
Sites to See
September 16th, 2010
• FOLLOW THAT CUISINE (taxigourmet.com)• HAUNTED TOONTOWN (animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com)• SOLE CONTRIBUTOR (toemailers.blogspot.com) Read more »
Fall Arts Preview: Literature
Bumper Crop
Autumn brings a bounty of fresh Las Vegas literary efforts
September 9th, 2010
The Blue Angel Motel sits at the bottom of Fremont Street in a neon graveyard where the signs still advertise “Color TV,” the swimming pools are filled with gravel, and the rent money is earned at the blood bank. No valets or bellmen or doormen here. Just madmen (and madwomen). It’s a two-story motel … with a million stories. Read more »
Reading
Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death
September 9th, 2010
I greeted Rick Moody’s new novel, The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown & Co., $26), with high expectations. I’m a great fan of Moody’s early work, particularly his novel The Ice Storm (Little, Brown & Co., 1994) and the short stories in The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (Black Bay Books, 1995), but I’ve been disappointed with his recent efforts and didn’t even finish his last novel, The Diviners (Little, Brown & Co., 2005). However, I thought The Four Fingers of Death might be a welcome return to form for Moody. It’s a comic novel with a high concept, and the book is dedicated to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut—all good signs. Read more »
Reading
The Librarian Loves ...
Selected by Jeanne Goodrich, executive director for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.
September 9th, 2010
Everybody has anecdotes about their “crazy family” but the story Jeannette Walls tells about hers in The Glass Castle (Scribner, 2005) would beat most. She, her brother and two sisters are raised by parents who are both disengaged (to the point of providing no food, clean clothes, habitable shelter or protection from sexual predators) and fiercely in love with their family. Read more »
Reading
Sites to See
September 2nd, 2010
• Rejectamenta (therejectionist.com)• Thinking Astride of the Box (apartmenttherapy.com)• Irony Man (pinuprdj.tumblr.com) Read more »
Reading
The Librarian Loves ...
Selected by Jeanne Goodrich, executive director for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.
August 26th, 2010
When does clutter turn into a compulsive hoarding disorder? In Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), pioneering hoarding researchers Randy Frost and Gail Steketee describe various manifestations of what is now recognized as a mental disorder that afflicts six million Americans. Read more »
Reading
Sites to See
August 19th, 2010
• FORWARD INTO THE PAST• ALL THE SINGLE LADIES, PUT YOUR DUKES UP• YOUR VEGAS CAMERA Read more »
Reading
Two Epics of Epic Epicness
From book to movie, one child of the ’80s reviews the Scott Pilgrim Gen-Y franchise
August 19th, 2010
Scott Pilgrim is the quintessential indie slacker: occasionally employed, bumming off others, obsessed with video games and comics, but basically a good guy. He’s living with his friend, not doing much with his life, when he meets the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers. She’s got dyed hair, aviator goggles and the ability to travel the subspace highways through Scott’s brain. But if Scott wants to date her, he must first defeat her Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriends. This battle for true love is complicated by Scott’s own exes, ambitious bandmates and Knives Chau, Scott’s clingy high school sorta-girlfriend—but mostly by Scott himself. Read more »
Reading
The Librarian Loves ...
Selected by Jeanne Goodrich, executive director for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.
August 12th, 2010
Described in a Library Journal review as “rambunctiously entertaining,” Thomas Perry’s new novel, Strip (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), is a fast-paced L.A. crime novel by an Edgar-winning writer who consistently provides unique characters and plot twists. Strip club owner Manco Kapak is robbed as he attempts to deposit his cash receipts (substantial, since he has a nice money-laundering business going). Read more »
Reading
A Whale of a Tale
Super-writer China Miéville brings fantasy to the mainstream with this hefty page-turner
August 12th, 2010
When the Darwin Centre’s prize exhibit, an eight-meter giant squid, goes missing, biologist Billy Harrow is drawn into an other-London of battling cults and competing Armageddonim. In Kraken (Del Ray, 2010), the world is hurtling to some kind of apocalypse—but which one? China Miéville is a Dungeons & Dragons super-nerd, but with an Oxford and Harvard education and a failed run for Parliament. Miéville combines that impressive background with a love of pulp horror and its monsters. Read more »
