My first Chabon! OOOOOOF. WOW. Holy crap, you guys, did you know that his prose is exceptional and that there’s no exposition, and that he creates an utterly believable alternate timeline and a narrative that ramps up until you’re flying down the other side of the rollercoaster with no brakes? Are they all like this? Is my brain going to melt? How have I missed out this my entire adult life? Full disclosure: it took me a really long time to gather momentum with “The […]
Musings on Manhood
Michael Chabon grew up in the 70s, a semi-practicing Jewish child of divorce, often picked on for being different in school. I’m about 20 years younger, lapsed Episcopalian, and while my parents don’t always seem to like each other very much, they raised my sister and I together behind a (mostly) united front. Like Chabon, I was (and am) wildly geeky, but I found “my people” at a young age and don’t have any real memories of being bullied or teased or anything like that. […]
Wish it had been quite a bit longer!
My love for Michael Chabon has been well documented on CBR. While I enjoyed this novella — my main complaint is its incredible brevity (which I know is the point of a novella, but still) — it definitely wasn’t one of my favorites of his. True, it’s skewed towards a younger audience, but so was Summerland and I loved that book so much that it made my husband jealous. “A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife’s lover, this you consider […]
McSweeney’s #10 (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #10)
I saw the cover of this book at a book sale and I fell for it, hard. It’s a compilation of “genre” short stories: westerns, sci-fi, horror, crime, etc. The reason for my instant need to own? Contributing authors include: Michael Chabon (who also edited), Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Michael Crichton (who sadly contributed a rather lame tale), Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison, and more. Love at first sight, I’ll tell you. It mostly lived up to my expectations as well. The majority […]
Summerland by Michael Chabon
Y’all this was so good. So, so good. It was like the best of what I love about Stephen King novels — grand, sweeping adventures like Dark Tower or The Talisman that focus on young kids getting wrapped up in mythology and having to save the world. It reminded me quite a bit of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods as well — mythology in the modern world, the old gods forced to adapt to the new. A Michael Chabon treatment of this kind of adventure? Sign me up! “Mr. Feld […]
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
I love Michael Chabon’s books. I really do. This is a totally biased, wonder-struck review of a novel that I probably wouldn’t have liked nearly as much if anyone else’s name had been on the cover. But the cover says Chabon, and therefore I will sing its praises. “When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and […]