Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground by Charles Bowden. Bowden digs deeper into the American soul and comes up with more disturbing tales of the denizens of the desert. A prisoner obsessed with painting presidents and "sex offenders whose desires are not as alien as we would wish."


Desierto: Memories of the Future by Charles Bowden. "Desierto brings his method to a new pitch of mournful lyricism and visionary power." In this earlier book, Bowden looks at la problema of Mexico; the drug kingpins and various other predators—human and not. A brilliant and disturbing experience as all his books are.


The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. Dillard's essays have the comfy feel of E.B. White's essays. The book contains a series of essays (Montaigne-esque in a modern style) on her experiences of writing (too much coffee and playing baseball with somebody's kids outside her studio window) and living.All-in-all she still gets the job done.


Still Life with Volkswagons by Geoff Nicholson. The only way I can explain this is to use the dreaded "rollicking tale" analogy. The story deals with a variety of Volkswagon collectors, everyone from the young and rich to new agers, eco terrorists and neo-nazi's. But who is blowing up Volkswagons all over England and who will solve the mystery? Rollicking (there it is) good read.

Footsucker by Geoff Nicholson. After Still Life with Volkswagons I thought I would read another Nicholson book. It was interesting in a Sacher-Masoch meets Palahniuk sort of way. But sadly it lacked the subtlety of Sacher-Masoch and the intelligence of Palahniuk. A mediocre read about a foot-fetishist and his obsession with a woman with beautiful feet. A better book in the retifist vein would be John Fergus Ryan's Watching or even Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.


Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg. For those out there who think the news gives you all you'll need to keep up with current events will be surprised at how selective the media are in what they report. I was amazed not only at what I was missing but also at what I wasn't being told at all. Goldberg walks the media minefield blowing the whistle on the industry the whole way.

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes. This was my first foray into Barnes; a biography of Flaubert disguised as a novel about a man coming to terms with his wife's suicide. I didn't need the accompanying story as Barnes' coverage of Flaubert's life was interesting enough to keep my complete interest. I found myself having to mentally re-adjust as some part of the fiction presented itself while still following the life of Flaubert. Luckily, I have Flaubert in Egypt which is mentioned in the book. I'm still on the look-out for a book of his letters.

Welcome to the book section. A mixture of reviews, beefs and lists. I considered separating them into topics (non-fiction, fiction, et al) but since that isn't how I read them I listed them as is. This year has been a good year for books. I'd been eagerly awaiting new books by Zadie Smith (Autograph Man), Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby), Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity) and Dan Fante (Spitting Off Tall Buildings) and now that I've got them all and have finished reading them I can say that it was worth the wait (in gold). I was surprised to read that the critics were unsatisfied with Smith's book, I found the book more controlled than White Teeth which in my opinion had a poorly resolved ending. The critics have been a lot more friendly to Palahniuk whose book saw a return to the brilliance of his earlier works. Frankly I was disappointed with his last endeavor, Choke, which seemed to lack the balance between the 'facts' and story needed for his style of 'dangerous writing' to coalesce into a believable story. Suspension of belief is needed to enjoy any book, especially so for Chuck's, but a foundation of reality has to be fabricated for his work to shine and in this Choke failed. The reviews for Eggers is mixed and extreme; personally I'm enjoying the book even with the copy-editing mistakes. He is a good writer, there's no denying it. There are some really strong passages in this book that I happily reread a couple of times but in general it's not a masterpiece (and neither was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, no matter who told you heard otherwise).

Enjoy,
Paul