who is the funniest writer alive?

You think you know who it is, but you don’t. Uness you think it is Ian Frazier, in which case you are correct.

Here is the first paragraph of his Gone To New York… it’s all I’ve read so far and I’m already laughing:

If you drilled a hole straight through the earth, starting at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street, you would pass through ten inches of pavement, four feet of pipes, thrity-five feet of Seventh Avenue subway, about twenty-two hundred miles of rock, about thirty-six hundred miles of nickel-iron core, and then another twenty two hundred miles of rock. You would come out in the Indian Ocean, 106°3′ east longititude and 40°45′ south latitude, about three hundre miles off the southwest coast of Australia. You would have reached Manhattan’s antipodes, or diametrically opposite point on the globe. You wold be about two and a half miles under water.

The funniest thing I have ever read was written by Ian Frazier. It was the title piece of his collection Coyote vs. Acme. I’m laughing now just thinking about it.

boy in a hood

Stephen Lawhead is a prolific author. Born in America, he later moved to England from whence he embarked on his multi-faceted literary career. He may be most esteemed for his retelling and resetting of the Arthurian legends. Each of these books left me panting for more.

True confession time: I embarked on reading the Pendragon Cycle because I was avoiding The Left Behind books, which a friend was urging me to read. “I’ve got at least five books waiting!” I would say, and mean it. After the Pendragon books, I moved on to another series, The Chronicles of Narnia, and then another, The Lord of The Rings. By then my overzealous friend had left me behind and moved to another city.

Lawhead’s latest multi-book effort finds him reworking another famous legend: Robin Hood. But this time Robin Hood is Welsh, from the Cymry, like King Arthur. Following the novel, Lawhead himself steps in with an explanation for moving Robin Hood to the woods of Wales from Sherwood Forest, and renaming him Rhi Bran (King Raven, hence the title of the series).

Hood is the first of three King Raven books. It is certainly not Lawhead’s best… I would place his Byzantium, any of The Celtic Crusades series, as well as Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur from the Pendragon Cycle head and shoulders above Hood. And be forewarned, there are one or two seriously ham-fisted sentences in this book, one of which closes with the following altogether aggravating alliteration…

“…bellowed the baron with bluff bonhomie.”

Woah. Alliteration is good, but…

Hood is entertaining, however. It’s fun to see how Lawhead weaves the story together from his Welsh backdrop, with castle intrigue from the time of William II, following the Norman Conquest.

Hood may not be Lawhead’s best, and you may want to read some of his other stuff because at his best, Lawhead is very good, yet I’m already looking forward to the next King Raven installment.

i’m a moocher

I rediscovered StumbleUpon today because of a post at TechCrunch  and promptly stumbled onto BookMooch, which seems to be quite cool.

Create an account, then list a bunch of books you’d like to offer. You get .1 point for each. List ten and you can use your one point to mooch a book off someone else.

I don’t know if this is good form or not, but I sent an email to a more experienced moocher asking about the condition of one of his books that I’d like to get my hands on. I’ll let you know how this forst moochfest works out.

You can acquire “friends” in the BookMooch community, so if you’ve got books, I’ve got some too. Maybe we can be friends?

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mccarthy’s “the road”

Just finished reading Cormac McCArthy’s The Road. It is a relentlessly bleak masterpiece of harrowing post-apocalyptic fiction. Abandon hope, all ye who enter these pages.

Read Michael Chabon’s well written review. But you really should read the book first.

The eventual safety of a character in a McCarthy novel is always in doubt, but the reader’s usual sense that a disembowelment or clean shot to the brainpan lies only a paragraph away has never been so excruciating as in The Road, where the life of a child whose innocence is literally singular is threatened from the first paragraph of the novel.

Hat tip to Scott Esposito.

Technorati tags: Cormac McCarthy

you light up my… book

Slate tests for the best book light here. Now, where was this article last week when I bought one (not the best, either)?

This article brought to you via Kimbooktu who one of you fine blogrollites introduced me to, though I’m sorry to report that I can’t remember exactly who. Anyway, she’s bookish but that’s just fine with me. You can find Kim and her books and her book paraphernalia in the blogroll as of now.

reading ‘a long way down’

I’m about two thirds of the way through A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. It’s good. Here’s a plot synopsis from the linked page,

 

New Years Eve at Toppers House, North London’s most popular suicide spot. And four strangers are about to discover that doing away with yourself isn’t quite the private act they’d each expected.

Perma-tanned Martin Sharp’s a disgraced breakfast TV presenter who had it all – the kids, the wife, the pad, the great career – but he ‘pissed it all away’. Killing himself is Martin’s ‘reasonable and appropriate response’ to an unliveable life.

Maureen has to do it tonight, because of Matty being in the home. He was never able to do any of the normal things kids do – like walk or talk – and loving-mum Maureen can’t cope any more. Dutiful Catholic that she is, she’s about to commit the ‘biggest sin of all’.

Half-crazed with heartbreak, loneliness, adolescent angst, seven Bacardi Breezers and two Special Brews, Jess’s ready to jump, to fly off the roof. Lastly, there’s JJ – tall, cool, American, looks like a rock-star (was, in fact, a rock-star before his band split) – who’s weighed down with a heap of problems and pizza.

Four strangers, who moments before were all convinced that they were alone and going to end it all that way, sit down together, share out the pizza and begin to talk.

Hornby’s a talented writer. He can write a book about suicide that makes you laugh regularly and out loud. He’s sort of an unpretentious Rushdie, if that makes any sense. Though maybe unpretentious isn’t the word. I’m a big Rushdie fan, but there is something ‘high’ about his language that isn’t in Hornby. For his part, Hornby posesses the same abililty at sentence wizardry, but uses less syllables than his counterpart. I’m sure you know exactly what I mean, right?

Other titles by Hornby include How to Be Good, About A Boy, and High Fidelity (the last of which I have not read). While I’m really enjoying Long Way Down, and I would recommend any of the three, I think About A Boy is the best of the group.

 

Technorati tags: nick hornby, a long way down