25 October 2019

Reading List July - Septenber 2019

Juan Jose Millas (trans. Thomas Bunstead & Daniel Hahn), From the Shadows. NY: Bellevue, 2019.

Damian is an unemployed middle-aged man when he steals a tie clip and hides in a wardrobe to escape. When the wardrobe is purchased, he becomes the Ghost Butler, and by the end it is even creepier than this already sounds.


Robert B. Parker, Judas Goat. NY: Dell, 1978.

In which Boston PI Spenser goes to London to catch or kill a gang of bombers, misses Susan, and gets beaten in an arm-breaking contest at the Montreal Olympics. And reads Regeneration Through Violence.


Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth, Wolfbane. London: Gollancz, 1986.

The Earth has been kidnapped by a group of machines that use people to keep themselves running. One of the people they select, however, is an antisocial outcast. Can he gum up the works well enough to save Earth from being fully consumed?


David McCullough, John Adams. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

A summer of revolution continues with this Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of the second President. McCullough makes the irascible New England farmer, one of the Revolution’s intellectual leaders, seem a much better hero than the gallant Virginians, who spoke of freedom while relying on slaves. Part of this is his grace as a storyteller, but much of the power comes directly from quoted correspondences between John and Abigail.


Richard Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. NY: Penguin, 1966.

A year in the life of a wild outsider at (prestigious private university in Upstate New York) during the late 1950s, this book has all the sex, drugs, and revolution requisite to a cult classic, delivered in the wry, questioning voice of one who has seen too much, too young.