1000 Books In 10 Years: Vol. 246: Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo
I’ve been meaning to get around to reading a Don DeLillo novel for some time now. The fact that David Cronenberg (one of my favorite film directors) made a film adaptation of Cosmopolis (a DeLillo novel) sealed the deal as to which work I would read first. The novel is an interesting … [Read More...]
Man of Steel: A Commendable Failure
Man of Steel is an admirably ambitious film for a number of reasons. It not only attempts to make exciting a franchise that has been considered boring and obsolete, and one that has failed to be resuscitated as recently as 2006 with the underwhelming Superman Returns, but it also seeks to forgo … [Read More...]
1000 Books In 10 Years: Vol. 245: Drive, by James Sallis
James Sallis has earned his living writing crime fiction, which hasn’t ingratiated him with literary critics (or even Wikipedia-article writers for that matter: not one of his books has its own Wiki page). His style is conventional and harkens back to the pulp fiction style of … [Read More...]
Renoir: Liberating Women
Pierre-Auguste Renoir's work served as part of the Impressionist movement that would forever change the art world. His painting did not simply challenge convention via style, but also through content. The presentation of women in art had a strict tradition, one that Renoir embraced early in his … [Read More...]
1000 Books In 10 Years: Vol. 243 + 244: The Honest Whore (Parts 1 & 2), by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton
The Honest Whore Part 1 and 2 are a pair of Jacobean city comedy that work in concert to underline the hypocrisy of patriarchal standards of chastity; a system that demonizes women who are perceived as unchaste, while men who fail to practice abstinence face no social stigmatization and are indeed … [Read More...]
1000 Books In 10 Years; Vol. 91 and 92: The Crucible and A View From The Bridge, by Arthur Miller
The Crucible: A play about a witch hunt meant to parallel the McCarthy witch hunt that sought to find all communists in America and put them in jail if they didn’t name names. The protagonist, like Miller, who was called before the House of Un-American Activities, refused to name names. The play comes across as [...]
1000 Books In 10 Years: Vol. 236: The Shipping News, by Anne Proulx
Sometimes, when you discover a great author, you can help but tear through their entire bibliography. This is what I did when I discovered Kurt Vonnegut and Cormac McCarthy. I should pace myself and savour their work, but I simply cannot help myself. I was on the lookout for a new author to fall in [...]
1000 Books In 10 Years; Vol. 123 and 124: Black Gangster and Street Players, by Donald Goines
The beautiful thing about a Donald Goines novel is that it is unabashedly raw. They are like photographs of the American dream taken from the gutter of the Detroit ghetto. There are a group of people who did not have access to the pristine American dream as it was sold to white, middle-class America in [...]
1000 Books In 10 Years: Vol. 245: Drive, by James Sallis
James Sallis has earned his living writing crime fiction, which hasn’t ingratiated him with literary critics (or even Wikipedia-article writers for that matter: not one of his books has its own Wiki page). His style is conventional and harkens back to the pulp fiction style of classic crime novels from the 40’s and 50’s. [...]
1000 Books In 10 Years; Vol. 43: Slaughterhouse Five (or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death), by Kurt Vonnegut
When I was in my late-teens and early twenties, I went on a Vonnegut kick and tore through just about every book he wrote and loved them. Its been over tens years since I last read a Vonnegut book (though I do sometimes return to some of the short stories from Welcome To The Monkey [...]
