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THE NOVEL:
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Emotionally punishing, almost unbearably suspenseful, and written with an icy, exacting discipline, ATONEMENT is more or less as good as modern literature gets, I think. It's a perfectly pitched story of romantic love, but if that isn’t your cup of tea, there's also people getting pulverized by thousand-pound bombs, and human legs hanging from trees. So, y'know: it's got a li’l sumpin' for everyone.
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THE SHORT STORY:
"Disguises" by Ian McEwan
If you don’t want to take a chance on ATONEMENT, worried maybe it’ll leave you bored (it won’t), you could always taste test McEwan’s work with a few of his short stories. Like this one, from the collection that launched his career, FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES. Deranged and perverse, the most shocking moments in this story are the unexpected instances of tenderness and grace. Also good is “Solid Geometry,” (a straight-forward Lovecraftian horror tale), and “Last Day of Summer,” which comes on all lyrical and beautiful and shit and ends with a kidney-punch of an ending that’ll set you reeling.
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THE MOVIE:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
It’s said if you’re an English actor and haven’t been in one of the Harry Potter films, it’s time to fire your agent. Okay, no joke: this is a hell of an ensemble. Some actors (David Thewlis who does Professor Lupin and Bonnie Wright who plays Ginny Weasley) offer up thoughtful, nuanced performances… without ever delivering a line. The other reason to see ORDER is that director David Yates manages to tease a genuinely human story out of Rowling’s most convoluted novel. What could’ve been a chaotic incomprehensible mess is, instead, a streamlined, satisfying narrative about people we’ve come to care for a great deal in the last decade.
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THE VIDEO:
THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD
This film captures Mike Mignola’s signature look and singular imagination in twenty-two hilarious, dizzying, zombie-battling minutes. And Screw-On Head - an ageless robotic secret agent in the service of Abraham Lincoln and the Republic - is a great hero. I guess this was meant as the pilot to a TV series that never happened, which is too bad… there was the chance to do something really unique here (it’s very uniqueness is probably what sunk it). And at the very least, there could’ve been some kick-ass action figures.
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THE SONG:
"TWO" by Ryan Adams
Guy sings, “I got a really good heart/I just can’t catch a break/If I could I’d treat you like you wanted me to, I promise.” Which in three simple, declarative lines expresses a whole broken heart full of self-delusion and longing.
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THE ALBUM:
BLACK RAIN - Ozzy Osbourne
Yes. YES, bitch.
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THE COMIC:
THE FIXER - Joe Sacco
A self-important Bosnian bullshit artist spins one self-aggrandizing war story after another in this unforgettable comic book, a tale very much on par with Spiegelman’s MAUS. Joe Sacco unravels the confusing snarl of the Bosnian war, while at the same time exploring the complicated psychology of one survivor, a man both troubling and manipulative, but also undeniably sympathetic.
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THE GAME:
MARVEL ATTACKTIX
You can battle with these little dart-shooting action figures on any flat surface. Before they produced a line of Marvel Superheroes, there were Transformers Attactix and Star Wars Attacktix, but the game has reached dork perfection with the ability to pit the X-Men against the Sinsiter Syndicate. I've never been so addicted to a game I suck at. I've played half-a-dozen opponents, and my current record is something like 3 - 149.
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THE FUN THING TO DO WITH CHALK:
Classic Game Art
Here’s my lovingly rendered depiction of Pac-Man’s first board. Next up: Space Invaders.
I love the summer.
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THE BREAD :
Fabulous Flats Tandoori Naan
Makes any dinner naanalicious.
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ANTICIPATED PLEASURE:
I AM LEGEND
The kneejerk response of the fanboys is that Will Smith is all wrong for Richard Matheson's tale of the last man standing in a world ruled by vampires... template for a hundred stories like it, including NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and 28 DAYS LATER. But the preview I saw suggested that someone has finally done this story right (after two other adapations, a mediocre Charleton Heston vehicle and a somewhat better Vincent Price feature). None of this is the reason I'm anticipating the picture with such pleasure, though. Naw, my motives are way more selfish than that. Keep yer eye on the Times Square scenes when the picture is finally out. That's all I'm going to say.
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RECENT AND RECOMMENDED ARCHIVE |
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ALL TIME FAVORITES
So here are the books that made me want to write, the books I care most about in the world, the ones that have cut the deepest grooves in my own personal interior landscape. My tastes are nothing if not embarrassingly mainstream – most of these stories are well-known and well-loved and for good reason. If there’s anything here you haven’t read, you’re missing out.
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The Collector by John Fowles.
The Silence of the Lambs was an irresistible pop thriller, but what few people know is that Thomas Harris’ masterwork was a conscious reimagining of The Collector, a novel about a repressed psychotic and the girl he kidnaps and keeps in his basement. The Collector is impossible to put down and yet so harrowing it’s also almost impossible to finish. |
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The House With A Clock In Its Walls by John Bellairs.
What The Collector is to The Silence of the Lambs, The House With A Clock In Its Walls is to Harry Potter. I’m not taking anything away from J.K. Rowling – the Harry Potter novels are, as far as I’m concerned, the most pure fun I’ve had reading anything in the last couple years – but The House With A Clock In Its Walls is the masterpiece of fantasy she hasn’t written yet. |
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The Dead Zone by Stephen King.
The Green Mile covers a lot of the same territory, emotionally and thematically, and does it with a grace and technical aplomb that’s missing in The Dead Zone. Nevertheless, The Dead Zone is one of the finest stories of the supernatural ever written, and certainly one of the most moving. Johnny Smith is King’s most compulsively likable protagonist, and John’s Rip-Van-Winkle-crossed-with-Lee-Harvey-Oswald odyssey is the stuff of both great tragedy and great popular fiction. |
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The Fixer by Bernard Malamud.
The Fixer tells the story of a lonely and troubled Jewish carpenter, who finds himself imprisoned in a turn of the century Russian gulag, accused of everything from murder to drinking the blood of Christian children. I’m not Jewish, I’ve never been closer to Moscow than London, and I’ve never been in jail; there was no reason for this book to connect with me like it did. Except: it did. And it will with you, because above all it is an overpowering work of suspense, the kind of thing that will grab you and hold you, through the sheer power of the writing and the situation, from almost the first sentence to the last. |
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Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. “Well,” says Gus McCrae on page 4,365 of this approximately ten-thousand page western. “This looks like a good place to stop and watch the cows shit.” Actually Lonesome Dove is only a thousand pages long, and I loved every one of them. This novel contains gunfights, sandstorms, gang rape, a horrifying little anecdote about a boy being bitten to death by a nest of water moccasins, ghosts, magic and visions, whole families murdered and their bodies strung up and burned for fun, horse thieves, herds of electrified longhorns, a villain of breathtaking savagery, several heroes (also of breathtaking savagery), and finally, the friendship of two hard, imperfect, tragedy-haunted men. It’s also frequently hilarious. Anything you think you want from a story is in here somewhere. Not since Huckleberry Finn has anyone written so well about friendship; or, as far as that goes, about America. |
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Rounding out my personal top-ten are these five other masterpieces:
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The Lord of the Flies by William Golding |
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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
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The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 1 by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
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Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury |
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. |
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