Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
It was the Fall of 1999 and I was a junior in high school. I’d stayed after school for some reason, was waiting to get picked up by my mom, and was sitting outside on the concourse in front of the school cafeteria – probably reading a book – when a student walked up to me. I didn’t know the guy, but he started talking about a movie that just came out called “Fight Club”. He said it was amazing, and proceeded to describe the […]
The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nahisi Coates
Buck by MK Asante
Yellow-Back Radio Brokedown by Ishmael Reed
Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara
The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes
The Double Helix by James Watson
Pafko at the Wall by Don Delillo
Williwaw by Gore Vidal
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon
The Mahe Circle by Georges Simenon
The Hand by Georges Simenon
The Engagement by Georges Simenon
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
The Promise by Damon Galgut
Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk
Gerald's Party by Robert Coover
The Beautiful Struggle – 5/5 Stars I never taught in Baltimore City, but I did teach in Baltimore County, where Ta-Nehisi Coates spends part of high school. (I was two schools over, but the idea was pretty much the same there). So the result is some familiarity here. If I ever met Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think what I would want to tell him is when I was brand new to Baltimore, so when I scheduled my meeting with the MVA (DMV) I went to the […]
The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake
The Dark Tower by CS Lewis
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk
The Feathers of Death by Simon Raven
The Drowned Cities by Paulo Bacigalupi
Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Hot Rock – 3/5 Stars A farcical kind of heist book. John Dortmunder is getting out of prision and his old pal immediately brings him a caper to work on. Together with three other specialists, the friends will be stealing an emerald from a museum that has cultural and sentimental value for two warring African nations. One of the nations currently possesses the emerald, while the other is hiring the thieves. Paid a salary, plus the promise of a large reward, Dortmunder begins to […]
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
Thirteen-year-old Madison Spencer–the chubby, precocious, pampered daughter of two of Hollywood’s brightest stars–discovers one day that she has died (of a marijuana overdose, of all things!) and is now in Hell. Hell, as it turns out, is just as gross as one would expect but significantly more boring. Determined to make the best of it, Madison finds some equally damned friends and begins her quest for something that perhaps resembles meaning? As with all Chuck Palahniuk books, I’m not entirely sure whether I liked it. […]
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Congo by Michael Crichton
This is a reread for both of these books, but it’s also possible I never read Congo — I did see the movie on HBO while babysitting in like 1997 and it’s truly awful. The book is also, not great, but it is a lot better than the movie. Fight Club, of course, I read right after watching the movie. Fight Club – 4/5 Stars This book mostly still holds up. Like the movie, of course, the satire (WHICH IS NOT SUBTLE ACTUALLY) does not […]
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk
Haunted is a series of short stories and poems, loosely related insofar as each is written from the perspective of different member of a group of degenerate sociopaths locked together in a masochistic “Writers’ Retreat”. **trigger warning** this review mentions some extreme and horrific aspects of the book, including miscarriage. The backbone of Haunted that ties each poem and short story together is a horrific three-month-long “Writers’ Retreat”. Each character with a poem and story to tell throughout the novel apparently answered a mysterious advertisement […]
