Interview: Reader who recently finished Echo Burning

1. So how long did it take you to read the book?

I started it on Monday afternoon and read it for a couple hours a day, until 7:30am today.

2. Did you ever read the book in public places or leave the book out purposefully when visitors were over?

I’m on a camping trip with my family (two parents, two brothers, two sisters-in-law, two nieces, two nephews, two dogs), and I kept leaving it on the picnic table but no one touched it. It’s my dad’s book.

3. How did you deal with the uh not reading a better book?

The parts with the guns were my favorite.

4. Have you read other Lee Child? How did this book compare?

I thought I’d read all of them but my dad keeps surprising me with more. This one wasn’t as good. The odds don’t seem to be as stacked against Reacher. Plus it’s more of a detective story than the others. The women aren’t described as “slim” quite so often, and Reacher doesn’t have sex with any of them. The main lady he partners with is a lesbian.

5. Did you read the book while on drugs or alcohol?

Nope, just fresh Adirondack air.

6. What other “large books” have you undertaken?

I just finished the third book in The Game of Thrones. READ MORE >

Random / 6 Comments
August 9th, 2012 / 11:09 am

The most used tags

Behind the Scenes / 1 Comment
August 9th, 2012 / 10:54 am
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Chill little New Yorker blog post about Justin Taylor’s new story in the New Yorker. Story is for paid subscribers only, but according to the adorable little pop-up ad, they are offering a free “WEEKENDER” bag (wine bottle pocket? fold-out cheese plate? 401k 101 booklet?) for new recruits, so get the urge.

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Author Anagrams: Paulo Coelho


Cup lo, aloe ho.
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Random / 8 Comments
August 8th, 2012 / 12:05 pm

Interview: Reader Who Yesterday Finished The Recognitions

HTMLGiant: So how long did it take you to read the book? 

David Fishkind: Three weeks I think. It took me about three minutes per page, so… forty-eight hours. I spent two days reading the book.

HG: Did you ever read the book in public places or leave the book out purposefully when visitors were over?  

DF: It was a library copy, so really, it didn’t matter. But yes, I read it on the subway and kept it on my bedroom desk and in my backpack.

HG: How did you deal with it? Do you think you’re a big man or something? 

DF: I don’t know. I thought I’d feel proud of myself. I ate seven or eight handfuls of blueberries when I finished. I didn’t cry or anything. Sometimes I looked words up in the dictionary.

HG: Have you read other Gaddis? How did this book compare?

DF: No. I guess maybe I’ll read JR in a year or a few months or so. I guess I’ll read them all if I don’t first die.

HG: Did you ever read the book while on drugs or alcohol? 

DF: Once or twice I’d had a some alcohol to drink, but it didn’t really do anything. I didn’t feel drunk, though I was… I didn’t tell anyone I was drunk… so…

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Mean / 14 Comments
August 8th, 2012 / 10:57 am

Magic & Writing & Me

I started playing Magic in the fall of 1994, when I arrived at college, and when the game was only a year old. My then girlfriend got me into it, in a reverse of a common geek stereotype. (I knew several female Magic players in college.) I quit playing four years later, right before graduation, selling off all of my cards (including a Timetwister!), but I’ve continued to vicariously follow the game since. I rarely play, but I did draft some of Ravnica Block (so awesome), and just last week I played in a M13 draft while visiting friends in Philadelphia. I lost in the first round, 0–2—I’m a terrible player, very out of practice—although later I did win a thee-person game of Commander, over dinner at a diner, where I played this deck. (In the M13 draft, I went Blue-Green, and had a decent deck, but very few ways to interact with my opponents’ creatures, and was done in by a Vampire Nighthawk—such a sick card! Although, in my defense, in the second game, I was forced to mull to 5, then never got a third land—and I think I still could have actually won, had my play been tighter….)

Back to vicariousness. I read Mark Rosewater’s “Making Magic” column every Monday (or Sunday night), and watch every video that Luis Scott-Vargas posts online. (He’s hands down my favorite player of all time, and I can’t wait until he gets elected into the Pro Tour Hall of Fame next year. Speaking of which: congratulations to Pat Chapin for making it in this year!) What can I say? Magic is fun and insanely complex; I like games and I like obsessive analysis. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s fantasy-based, one of my lifelong loves. And I’ve learned a tremendous amount about design and aesthetics by talking and reading about the game. (Rosewater’s weekly column is responsible for at least half of that.)

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I Like __ A Lot / 14 Comments
August 8th, 2012 / 8:01 am

Interview: Reader Who Recently Finished Infinite Jest

1.      So how long did it take you to read the book? 

I set a starting date at May 1 and then actually began a week before so I would have a buffer.  I finished around August 1.  So a little over 3 months.

2. Did you ever read the book in public places or leave the book out purposefully when visitors were over?  

Ha Ha.  I certainly read it in public places but I wouldn’t say I purposefully left it out.  It was out tho and people would see it.  I also mentioned it a lot in conversation.  I did this less to brag about the endeavor and more to make sure I backed up my talk about reading it.  I had tried reading 2666 by Bolano and never could get past book 5, I think book 5…Whichever one deals with all the deaths in Mexico.  I hate that, not finishing a book.  And I tend to have ADD and while reading a book will sometimes pick up other easier reading books, articles, chick mags, periodicals…For whatever reason I stayed focused on this book.  I didn’t so much as pick up another book while reading it.

3.     How did you deal with the footnotes, I mean logistically? I know some people like to use two bookmarks. 

Oh yea, two book marks.  I almost never use book marks and actually, it was more one book mark:  just for the end notes.  I did the dog ear for most of the main section.

4. Have you read other DFW? How did this book compare?

I have read a bunch of his nonfiction, which I love.  I had tried reading his short stories about 5 years ago and could not make it through them.  I am currently on a DFW binge though so I plan on picking all that stuff up and rereading it.  I love his nonfiction a lot, but this book…it had such a depth to it that you obviously are not going to get reading his nonfiction.  You can feel the work put into it, and the way it all adds up.  I remember reading somewhere to “trust” DFW while reading this book.  Just know at some point it’s going to click; and it did.

5. Did you ever read the book while on drugs or alcohol? 

I hope you don’t quote my name so my mom sees that I do drugs and alcohol…but yes.

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Random / 11 Comments
August 6th, 2012 / 6:19 pm

Reviews

Understories

Understories
by Tim Horvath
Belleveue Literary Press, May 2012
192 pages / $14.95  Buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Understories rises and falls in the geography of an infinitely complex urban landscape. The book maps a city made up of cities. Narratives made of indirect, minor narratives; stories within stories. The larger tales—Circulation, Runaroundandscreamalot!, The City in the Light of Moths, and The Understory, rise like skyscrapers in that expanse. In between which are a half-dozen case studies on “Urban Planning” that examine topographies where the only buildings are played on film projectors and entire economies and social structures are derived entirely from restaurants. Those crevasses are populated further still by shorts and one-offs that are the equivalent of strolling upon a brilliance of a hidden spot that had previously gone unnoticed:

Our talking is a kudzu of carotids in which we lose our marbles. Hours later, they tumble out as we are snoring, awakening us one at a time, hard little tumors we flick underneath one another. By morning, we lie like border states whose boundaries are rivers, anomalously straight, canals funded by nature.

Horvath is a master of the small who exercises a very precise and peculiar brand of metaphysics. Each of these stories has unique moral and ethical dimensions that are penned in by the fantastic and the absurd. If you look closely, the larger narratives readers are used to—dramatic juxtaposition, struggle for meaning, moral dilemma, justice, life and death—get their fair treatment, but they are compromised by an elusive force. Each story contains within its dominant logic an under-nature running concurrently against it. It is a dialectic that at its very most implicates the mutual manifestations of subject and object which create a world just ahead of us able to be perceived and at its very least does well to reinvigorate some of the stale and deadened devices of storytelling.

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9 Comments
August 6th, 2012 / 12:00 pm

Literature, Materialism, and the Present Conjuncture: an Interview with David Winters

Literary critic David Winters, co-editor of 3:AM Magazine, has steadily developed a style and practice of review that can only be called materialist. Rather than “evaluate” a book, Winters qualifies its relationship to the broken and stultifying world from which it originates–not as an outright transcendence of that world, but as a moment, an effect, of its awful machinery, the gore and rancor of a history that has in many ways forgotten to bear a future. The book as such does not seek to solve the problems of the anima mundi but instead to put them on stage and in motion. So the work of literature, David argues, would not be the archangel of the everyday, but would try to give shape to its devastation, to the series of social splits and divisions whose conjunction make the novel possible, if not, David suggests, also threaten it with obsolescence. By focusing on this element of the book–its immortality and undead texture, its position as both a social given and a reflection of such givens–David has aligned materialist aims with a new form of criticism: a reading of the work as a weapon and not simply a code, and moreover, a weapon that can be trained on both itself and the present in which it is embedded. The following is an extended interview with him. Enjoy.

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Author Spotlight / 6 Comments
August 6th, 2012 / 9:26 am