Tag Archives: books

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 14 – Go-Between

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day Fourteen – Go-Between, by Peter Rock
Read it online here:

Go-Between

So many of the stories I have collected in this month of short story writing are by familiar authors that I have read before. Either classic masters of the form, well-known maniacs trying to stretch what’s been before, or modern acclaimed virtuosos at throwing letters on the page.

That will not do.

I wanted something novel, an author I didn’t know – I need a new drug. So I turned to Google and some literary magazines that are willing to stick an occasional piece on the web for free (I’ll pay for it, but will you?) and struck a vein. Luckily it turned out to be gold and not hemoglobin.

The author is Peter Rock and the story is Go-Between.

I wanted mystery – something that left important (the most important) details to my imagination, I wanted clean prose (a little description is fine, but no rococo showing off), and I wanted some oddly off-kilter excitement.

Go-Between fit the bill perfectly.

It’s a sad commentary on my belated position on the mediocre arc of my nondescript life that I felt more of a kinship with the clumsy besuited disheveled stalker than with the attractive young characters trying to figure out where their skinny-dipping habits are about to take them. It is what it is.

So now I have someone new to read… a freshly-dug rabbit hole to tumble down. I don’t know if everything else he wrote is so attuned to what I’m looking for – but I’ll do the work to find out.

“How’s your grandma’s house?” he said. “Is it creepy, at all, living there?”

“I don’t know. It’s nice having all her old things, I guess, but I keep expecting her to be in the kitchen or come down the hallway. I never had to feed myself, there.”

Two long yellow kayaks slipped past. A lady in a bright red hat, a man with a gray beard. Naomi waved, and the man lifted his oar.

“Have you seen Sonja lately?” Alex said.

“We had breakfast this morning. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

Off to the right was a tangle of bushes and trees, some of them tipping over into the water. Hidden on the other side of those trees, down the river, was an amusement park. Screams rose up every minute or so, every time the people on the rollercoaster made the big drop, headed into the loop.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 13 – The Last Night of the World

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day Thirteen – The Last Night of the World, by Ray Bradbury
Read it online here:

The Last Night of the World

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
—-Final two lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
—-First two lines of Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice

Bang, Whimper, Fire, or Ice. Today’s story, The Last Night of the World by Ray Bradbury postulates that the world will end with a dream. Everyone will dream the same dream and realize that it is all over… not because of what we have done, really, but because of what we haven’t.

The story was published in Esquire – they say of it, “One of twelve short stories the late science-fiction legend wrote for Esquire. And, weirdly, perhaps the most lasting.”

It’s a calm apocalypse, a soothing end to things. Nobody riots, nobody goes nuts… they simply live the last day pretty much how they lived every other one.

It was written in 1951 and I think of how it resonated in the time. This was the greatest generation, after all, and they should have been reveling in their victory over evil. But what do you do as a follow-up?

The couple in the story has two small daughters. The opening scene is one of tranquil family life with the girls playing blocks on the parlor rug by the light of green hurricane lamps. The couple drinks brewed coffee from a silver pot out of cups with saucers.

That’s not a modern family – time has sped too much. Today they would be gulping Starbucks from paper cups while rushing from soccer practice to dance class while text messaging each other to remember to pick up a frozen microwave dinner on the way home.

The last thing the woman does is go down to the kitchen and turn off the water tap – she left it on after they had done the dishes together. If I had written the story I would have her go down there and turn it on – have her express a desire to leave the water running for eternity. But that’s the difference between 1951 and 2014.

The one thing in the story I don’t understand is the date. It states that the world will end on February 30, 1951 – a date which obviously never existed. I’m not sure what to make of this.

They sat a moment and then he poured more coffee. “Why do you suppose it’s tonight?”

“Because.”

“Why not some night in the past ten years of in the last century, or five centuries ago or ten?”

“Maybe it’s because it was never February 30, 1951, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it, because this date means more than any other date ever meant and because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.”

“There are bombers on their course both ways across the ocean tonight that’ll never see land again.”

“That’s part of the reason why.”

“Well,” he said. “What shall it be? Wash the dishes?”

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 12 – King of Jazz

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day Twelve – King of Jazz, by Donald Barthelme

Read it online here:

King of Jazz

When I was a little kid I played trombone for a while. Actually, I think I was beginging to be pretty good at it. I can’t complain – it has given me an understanding of music that has served me to this day. After a couple of years we moved to a place that had no brass bands open to me and I made the discovery that it is impossible to play a trombone by itself. Probably for the best; it was about this time I learned to type.

So today we have a very short story (as is his wont) about a trombone player by Donald Barthelme. The trombone player is named Hokie Mokie and he is the new King of Jazz… now that Spicy MacLammermoor, the old king, is dead.

I remember when I played trombone in the school band, the most frustrating thing was the challenge system. Anybody could challenge a higher seat and if he won, he would take the place. I was first seat but I had to constantly contend with a bevy of lesser players that would game the system. The fact I was a young freshman made me an especially tempting target. They would practice one single piece until they had it cold, then challenge me with that piece. I was a better player, so I would usually win, but they kept coming and all I had to do is make one mistake and down I went. The bandleader would encourage me to challenge back as soon as possible, but I tired of the game pretty quickly.

In this story Hokie Mokie is challenged right off the bat by a Japanese Trombone player named Hideo Yamaguchi and the title King of Jazz is suddenly up for grabs.

I came upon the writings of Donald Barthelme in an odd, backward way. I stumbled across an article in the New Yorker (Good Losers, March 8, 1999) written by two of his brothers, Stephen and Frederick. It was an eloquent piece about an extremely successful family, the father a famous and influential architect and three sons that were noteworthy writers. The article was about two of them, Frederick and Stephen, who had become terribly addicted to gambling. It was fascinating and horrifying to read how these enormously talented and intelligent men were destroying their lives by driving down to the cheap casinos along the Mississippi coast and blowing all their livelihood on blackjack binges.

During the course of the article the brothers wrote about their older brother, Donald, and his revolutionary genius as an author. That interested me enough to do some research and to start to read his stuff.

Most of what Donald Barthelme writes are very short stories, flash fiction. They are unique and unusual bits of text – not what you are expecting or used to reading. They give up on a regular plot arc and make the reader figure out the meaning from a series of seemingly unrelated, often ridiculous statements, occurrences, or facts.

It’s a bit of an acquired taste. At first it was attractive to me because of its short nature – I figured I could read these little morsels of tales in some spare seconds here or there. But their simplicity turned out to be an illusion. The stories were more complex and deeper than they appeared on the surface. It took longer than I expected and were more work than I was prepared for – the tiny things had to be re-read and thought about.

“What’s that sound coming in from the side there?”
“Which side?”
“The left.”
“You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like – ”
“Good God, it’s Hokie! Even with a cup mute on, he’s blowing Hideo right off the stand!”
“Hideo’s on his knees now! Good God, he’s reaching into his belt for a large steel sword – Stop him!”
“Wow! That was the most exciting ‘Cream’ ever played! Is Hideo all right?”

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 11 – Mirrorball

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day eleven – Mirrorball, by Mary Gaitskill.
Read it online here:

Mirrorball

Over the years I have read a lot of short stories. A lot of short stories…. Maybe a story every other day (with a lot of gaps, of course) since I was ten years old. That comes out to over eight thousand stories.

Obviously, that’s too high – but still, I have read a lot.

They all get mixed up – I’m always reading something that sort of feels familiar and then when I get to the end I realize I have read it before. I get authors mixed up, collections, anthologies and now with this internet thing… it’s so confusing.

One author that has always stood out is Mary Gaitskill. Her stories are full of desperate characters involved in all sorts of nasty trouble. She seems to know what she is writing about – she claims to have spent time as a stripper and a callgirl. I guess she is best known for writing the short story that the movie Secretary is based on – although the two are very different. She claims the movie was too charming and nice.

I know I’ve read the collection, Bad Behavior, that Secretary was in, but I don’t particularly remember it – I’ll have to read it again.

At any rate, today’s story is very different. This one is from her newest collection. Mirrorball is the story of a woman that has a one-night stand with a second-rate rock star and loses a piece of her soul in the process.

It’s a very unusual piece of writing.

I enjoyed the story, even though it isn’t really my cup of tea. It’s sort of an anti-Hemingway story in that nothing much happens (a couple of sexual encounters… and that’s about it) but a lot of words are spilled upon the page.

It’s a story told of a world inside of yet unknown to the characters; the world of their own souls – split, tortured, stolen, released.

It takes some skilled wordsmithing to go with something as ethereal as that and make it real to the reader. Read it, you decide.

He was a musician, well regarded in his hometown and little known anywhere else. This fact sometimes gnawed at him and yet was sometimes a secret relief; he had seen musicians get sucked up by fame and it was like watching a frog get stuffed into a bottle, staring out with its face, its splayed legs, its private beating throat distorted and revealed against the glass. Fame, of course, was bigger and more fun than a bottle, but still, once you were behind the glass and blown up huge for all to see, there you were. It would suddenly be harder to sit and drink in the anonymous little haunts where songs were still alive and moving in the murky darkness, where a girl might still look at him and wonder who he was. And he might wonder about her.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 10 – How To Talk To Girls At Parties

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day ten – How To Talk To Girls At Parties, by Neil Gaiman

Read it online here:

How To Talk To Girls At Parties

It’s a rare pleasure when you start out reading something and you think you know what it is going to be about – about a third of the way you are still sure and then, all of a sudden, you realize you are lost on a dark road and on the way somewhere unexpected… somewhere interesting and wonderful.

Reading something by Neil Gaiman… well, I should have known better. The title, the opening gambit… a young teenager trying to find his way in the world of women, intimidated by a good-looking, silver-tongued friend who has a way with the ladies. We’ve all read this before… we’ve all lived this before.

Then, all of a sudden….

Read it and find out.

You know when you are sixteen and confused and ignorant and you say to yourself, “I don’t understand any of this. Jeez! These girls all act like they are from another planet.”

Well, be careful….

She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as if she stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask. “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you,” she told me. “They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known.”

I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg pressing against hers.

She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my face.

“There are places that we are welcomed,” said Triolet, “and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?”

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 7 – This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day Seven – This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise, by J.D. Salinger

Read it online here:
This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise

So you’ve read Catcher in the Rye, I know you have. Everyone has. Everyone has to – it is a requirement.

And it doesn’t matter if you liked it, or respected it, or hated it… you know Holden Caulfield. If you let your mind go fuzzy for a second Holden ceases to be a literary character and becomes someone you knew, or thought you knew, or was yourself… when you were that age.

Even though everybody reads Catcher in the Rye, most folks don’t read the rest of J. D. Salinger’s writing. Oh, some drudge through Franny and Zooey, or pick up Nine Stories – but most don’t. Beyond that there are the published but “uncollected” stories. These are not readily available in print form – but there is the web – the ultimate source of all wisdom.

So I’ll bet that you, probably, don’t know what happened to Holden Caulfield.

Read the story first, It’s not very long. It’s protagonist is Vincent Caufield, Holden’s brother, as he attempts to solve a problem, a dilemma, involving a truckload of soldiers in a terrrific rainstorm in Georgia one evening. A sticky situation, but Vincent is only half thinking about it… he is mostly thinking about his brother.

So read it, now, and then come back so I can talk about it. Beware, spoilers ahead. Go on, read it.

….

….

….

….

So, Holden Caulfield is dead, (don’t let missing in action fool you, he never appears anywhere again). He’s dead at nineteen, only two years after Catcher in the Rye. Not only that, but This Sandwich Has no Mayonnaise was published six years before Catcher in the Rye – so J. D. Salinger already knew Holden was dead when he wrote the famous book.

How could he do that? How could he be so mean?

Easy, it’s easy. It’s because there is no such thing as Holden Caulfield. He’s completely imaginary. You can kill him, torture him, drive him crazy, leave him old and infirm in an Idaho rest home – anything you want. It doesn’t matter because it never really happens.

As for the reader… do you want to think that Holden survived? Do you want to believe that he eventually appeared somewhere, a little shell-shocked but otherwise as confused and loveable as ever? Well, go ahead and believe it – it’s at true as anything else – this is fiction of the highest order, which is all simply a pack of carefully crafted and well-told lies.

Just be glad you are not in the story, though. Because his brother is stuck there, and for him, Holden is gone, and it’s killing him.

“Gotta wait for the lieutenant,” I tell him. I feel my elbow getting wet and bring it in out of the downpour. Who swiped my raincoat? With all my letters in the left-hand pocket. My letters from Red, from Phoebe, from Holden. From Holden. Aw, listen, I don’t care about the raincoat being swiped, but how about leaving my letters alone? He’s only nineteen years old, my brother is, and the dope can’t reduce a thing to a humor, kill it off with a sarcasm, can’t do anything but listen hectically to the maladjusted little apparatus he wears for a heart. My missing-in-action brother. Why don’t they leave people’s raincoats alone?

The 22 Lost Salinger Stories

Inside the Mind of a Young J.D. Salinger

Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 2 – On the Gull’s Road

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

For the second entry in this month’s list of short stories, on this second day of June, I give you a classic chestnut by Willa Cather, On the Gull’s Road.

Read the story online here:
On the Gull’s Road

I know people that read a lot of Cather. I haven’t read that much.

I always think of her as a Nebraska writer (though I know she lived most of her life in New York) and primarily as a chronicler of life on the plains.

This story couldn’t be further from that. It’s a story of doomed young love on a ship leaving Italy.

One thing that jumps out is her wonderful ability to describe life on a ship. I’ve been on cruises – and the whole deal is so much different that what a sea voyage from Italy in that time must have been – but I recognize the scene and the unique unfettered feel that riding the waves leaves behind.

The sun had disappeared over the high ridge behind the city, and the stone pines stood black and flat against the fires of the afterglow. The lilac haze that hung over the long, lazy slopes of Vesuvius warmed with golden light, and films of blue vapor began to float down toward Baiae. The sky, the sea, and the city between them turned a shimmering violet, fading grayer as the lights began to glow like luminous pearls along the water-front, — the necklace of an irreclaimable queen. Behind me I heard a low exclamation; a slight, stifled sound, but it seemed the perfect vocalization of that weariness with which we at last let go of beauty, after we have held it until the senses are darkened. When I turned to her again, she seemed to have fallen asleep.

Of course, the oddest thing about the story is the ambiguous sex of the narrator – who falls in love with the doomed, married Mrs. Ebbling. Reading it, I assumed the narrator was a man (…anticipating a consular appointment…) but on careful examination it seems that this little fact is deliberately blurred. The narrator’s name is never mentioned and is never referred to by any pronoun that would give their sex away.

This ambiguity adds a layer of unreal mystery to the love between the two young people. It reinforces the melancholy, the feeling of loss, of regret, and of nostalgia that permeates the story.

There is a lot more here than a simple shipboard infatuation.

“Don’t say that. When I leave you day after tomorrow, I shall have given you all my life. I can’t tell you how, but it is true. There is something in each of us that does not belong to the family or to society, not even to ourselves. Sometimes it is given in marriage, and sometimes it is given in love, but oftener it is never given at all. We have nothing to do with giving or withholding it. It is a wild thing that sings in us once and flies away and never comes back, and mine has flown to you. When one loves like that, it is enough, somehow. The other things can go if they must. That is why I can live without you, and die without you.”

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 1 – A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today, the first of June, I present a nice, brief, short story by George Saunders, A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room. It’s available online, here:

A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room

Go ahead and read it – won’t take too long.

I have become a fan of George Saunders in the last few years. One of his stories, Sea Oak, was read and written about in the aforementioned June of 2013. More recently I wrote about the book, Tenth of December – his most recent tome of short fiction. I have checked his book Pastoralia out from the local library and it is next on my reading list.

His stories are full of tragedy and absurd humor. They dwell on the corporate influence on our lives today and take the soulless void of daily life – and stretch it to the extreme. Below this surface, though, lies the innermost desires and passions of the human heart struggling to rise through the thick layers of bullshit to be seen in the light of day.

Or something like that.

Today’s piece, A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room is of the type. It’s typical Saunders fare. As a matter of fact, it is prototypical.

What made the work interesting, is an introduction by author Tobias Wolff. Tobias Wolff is another of my favorite writers – his story Hunters in the Snow was also in my list of last year’s June subjects. I hear him speak at the Dallas Museum of Art once – his lecture on a classic poem (Two roads diverged…) has affected my views on literature ever since I heard it.

Read the introduction here:

Genius: an Introduction to George Saunders’ “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room”

It turns out that Tobias Wolff picked A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room out of the slush pile back in 1986 and gave George Saunders a fellowship that jump-started his writing career. In the years since Saunders has emerged as one of the most important writers of our day.

It’s always interesting to learn what twist of fate has enabled someone to rise from the vast pool of striving mediocrity into the rarefied air of success and fame.

That’s all it takes – the ability to craft something that will grip an uber-talented man like Wolff and make an impression strong enough for him to remember the moment of reading the story almost thirty years later.

That’s all it takes.

I opt for the Juarez at the Hollo-Chick Haus. It’s a South of the Border Taste Riot. A Hollo-Chick is a kind of chicken conglomerate, the size of a football and hollowed out. You can have whatever you want in there, croutons or sweet-and-sour pork or a light salad even. The Juarez is the one filled with sour cream and refried beans and some little sliced black things. I opt for extra sauce packets.

Always opt for extra sauce packets.

What I learned this week, March 28, 2014

Posted on by Bill Chance

Highways Are Bleeding Dallas. So Why Are You Surprised We Want to Kill One?

I-345 near downtown Dallas

I-345 near downtown Dallas

6 Freeway Removals That Changed Their Cities Forever

Fairdale Bikes in Austin has this little video to show their extensive and advanced R+D Department.

From National Review Online

The Republican Style

Barack Obama showed up at his meeting with Dutch PM Mark Rutte with his usual caravan of armored limousines and the like. Here’s how Mr. Rutte got there:

Danish PM Mark Rutte from National Review Online

Danish PM Mark Rutte
from National Review Online

But… but… the American President needs a huge entourage, of course, To Provide Security.

Stock Xootr Swift - I only added the seat bag and bottle cage (click to enlarge)

Stock Xootr Swift – I only added the seat bag and bottle cage
(click to enlarge)

Bike myths debunked

Rap Artists Wu-Tang Clan Fight Infinite Goods By Selling One Copy Of Their Next Album… For $1 Million

The Bourbon Barrel Temptress, on a Bourbon Barrel

The Bourbon Barrel Temptress, on a Bourbon Barrel

Drinking local has never been better in Texas

He also singles out several “brilliant, well-thought-out, delicious beers” from Dallas breweries: Velvet Hammer, an imperial red ale from Peticolas Brewing Co., Mosaic IPA from Community Beer Co. and Temptress, an imperial milk stout from Lakewood Brewing Co.

The man obviously knows what he’s talking about. Those three… plus Revolver’s Blood and Honey (which, I guess, isn’t really a Dallas beer) are my favorites.

A hearty cheer - for good beer.

A hearty cheer – for good beer.

The Wisdom of Mark Cuban

I’m not a huge fan of Silicon Valley. It reminds me so much of Hollywood and the movie and TV industry.
In Hollywood every one will talk and listen to you about your project. But while they are standing there, right in front of you, they are not looking at you. They are looking past you to the next project where they can raise/sell more. Where they can be a bigger star. There is always a bigger fish. Who ever is standing in front of them is hopefully just the bait.
Silicon Valley has become the exact same thing these days. No one wants to literally start from scratch in a garage and build something. No one wants to bootstrap a business to profitability. Those are such archaic notions these days.

The back to the future arbitrage of Silicon Valley and what it will take to beat it

“I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule number one of business.”

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban: ‘NFL is 10 years from implosion’

melancholia1

Ranking the Greats 10: Lars Von Trier’s 10 Best Films

melancholia2

Take a look at this photo from Googlemaps of an area outside of Boyers, Pa:

Boyers, PA

Boyers, PA

A huge parking lot out in the country, mostly filled with hundreds of cars. A mysterious road that trails off to an opening in the side of a mountain, leading all those people underground.

What do you think it is? Maybe a top-secret defense facility? An armored center for disaster response? The place where they keep the aliens from Area 51?

Nope, nothing like that.

Read about it and weep. It’s the dreaded

Sinkhole of Bureaucracy

Read This, Not That: Indie Alternatives to Popular Books

Read This, Not That 2: Alternatives to Popular Books

5. Instead of The Devil in the White City, read In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick.

I loved Devil in the White City – so that other one must be really good. Plus, I’ve been looking for an excuse to read Speak, Memory.

What I learned this week, March 14, 2014

Posted on by Bill Chance

10 underrated novels from great authors

I have always loved “The Crossing” by McCarthy more than some of his more ballyhooed works.

“The second chapter in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is also, at least in our eyes, the finest. More poetic if less acclaimed than spiritual precursor All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing is bleakly brilliant as McCarthy describes a young cowboy’s savage journey from New Mexico to Mexico during the WW2 period: surviving gun fights, wolf attacks and a cracked, scorching terrain that save for arguably Blood Meridian, has never been as violently and mercilessly described by McCarthy.”

From Deadspin:

Above is a video taken Saturday night at an ECHL Idaho Steelheads game. It shows fans pouring a $7 large beer into a $4 small cup, and discovering that each holds exactly the same amount of liquid. Now the arena is facing a lawsuit, because rule number one in sports is that you don’t shortchange hockey fans on beer.

CenturyLink Arena in Boise, also home to the Idaho Stampede of the NBA’s D-League, is facing a potential class-action lawsuit from four fans, alleging that the arena management company defrauded fans by offering taller-but-thinner large-size cups that hold the same 16 ounces as the shorter, wider small.
….
“It was recently brought to our attention that the amount of beer that fits in our large (20-oz) cups also fits in our regular (16-oz) cups. The differentiation in the size of the two cups is too small. To correct that problem, we’re purchasing new cups for the large beers that will hold 24 ounces, instead of 20, for the remainder of this season to provide better value to our fans.”

That acknowledgement wasn’t enough to head off a lawsuit, and, as noted by the Idaho Statesman, even with 24-ounce cups, it’ll still be cheaper per ounce to buy the small.

He once went on vacation to The Virgin Islands ..Now they are just called The Islands.

He once went on vacation to The Virgin Islands ..Now they are just called The Islands.

7 ways to be the most interesting person in any room

6 Shocking Authors I Seek to Syncretize

I linked to the above article not so much for the exact authors mentioned, but for the general idea/technique of reading a number of wildly variant (though all provocative) books (would this work with fiction also?) while consciously looking for hidden connections. Interesting idea.

10 Inconspicuous Flasks For Covert Operators

I always thought that I had a certain knowledge of geography and history. Until I visited this site, however, I never realized how little I knew of the fascinating country of Zubrowka.

budapest

Academie Zubrowka

I have always been fascinated by Trilobites

Trilobites

Trilobites

When Trilobites Ruled the World

Why don’t I get invited to parties that have a Sriracha Fountain?

These weapons cutaways are so damn cool

Holy Shit! Looking through this list, I really think I have seen all these movies. I pretty much agree with the order of the list (especially concur with which is THE WORST Godzilla movie of all) although I would put Godzilla vs. Destoroyah a bit higher to #2 and maybe slide Destroy all Monsters to the top slot. That film was an eleven-year-old’s dream

Rank All Monsters! Every Godzilla Movie, from Worst to Best

Michael Peticolas on the Building of a “True Craft Beer Movement” and What’s in His Fridge