What Are You Reading?

[Andrew]

20th century open form poets made structure work for them instead of vice versa. McCarthy is just bringing that movement to the novel. I can't speak to the breadth of his work, but I think it lends a fittingly biblical feel to this particular story.

So eff you and your quotation marks, pops!

What works in poetry doesn't always lend itself to prose. I'll take my capital letters and punctuation over biblical feelings. But hey, to each their own. I enjoyed a Dean Koontz novel once, so what the fuck do I know.

[Josh]

Which one?

[Andrew]

Odd Thomas. And actually a few other recent ones. It's like over the past few years, he stopped trying to be a poor man's Stephen King and started hamming it up. And strangely enough, it works quite well.

[Josh]

I liked the one with the dog.

[Andrew]

The Darkest Evening of the Year? That one was good. He's had very few stinkers in the past decade, now that I think about it. It stands in stark contrast with the rest of his career.

[Josh]

I'm being sarcastic. For a while there, every book he wrote had a supernatural dog in it.

[Andrew]

I was 50/50 on if you were or not, but thought otherwise because it actually was decent. But yeah, definite dog and art deco fetishes.

[MechDeus]

Don't even bother with the last three books! Not kidding!

That's actually where I stopped, although it was because I got annoyed at waiting and swore off the series until he finished it. Aside from the first book (which I would've been only one year old when it came out) I was reading them as they released and was enjoying it. I still feel like I should finish it just because of it being a chunk of my childhood.

[Tones]

I just finished re-reading the Hitchhiker's Guide series a few days ago, and read The Grapes of Wrath over the last few days. The latter kind of makes any bad experience of my own seem a bit insignificant.

[Error]

I just read Churchill's Secret Agent, by Max Ciampoli & Linda Ciampoli, a story that is apparently based on a true story, but which has the main character involved in so many crucial events of the war that I feel it's based on a true story only because WWII actually happened. But I'd like to believe it.