So many books and so little time in life to read them, but today we have some you should add to your To Be Read list. Also, we take a journey into the harsh & surreal landscape of Iceland along with a Danish priest out to tame the people and the land.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – What We’ve Been Reading/Godland”
Runaway: Stories by Alice Munro
May & June have been my two favorite reading months this year. It’s one of those rare times when I didn’t read anything I disliked. As you’ll see in one review, my expectations for a new book didn’t pay off, but I still didn’t think the book wasn’t worth reading. May started with my first read ever of the fantastic Canadian author Alice Munro. Very much in the vein of your classic literary short stories, Munro offers up stories that spotlight crucial moments in everyday people’s lives, women exclusively. Spanning the decades, these stories all deal with choices these women made at some point, often affected by circumstances that shaped them going forward.
Continue reading “Book Update – May/June 2023”
A Short Film About Disappointment by Joshua Mattson
Here’s the premise: Film critic Noah Body writes and uploads his reviews on a widely ignored content aggregator in the near future. He is a wannabe director who is forced to watch the worst movies knowing zero people are reading his work. Noah starts including details of his complicated & spite-filled personal life in these reviews. Through eighty movie reviews, we follow Body’s life and how it falls apart around him. That sounds really good, right? It’s a shame that this book is a nearly unreadable piece of crap. I loved the premise, but the final product was a brutal slog. One of the most significant issues is that the chapters aren’t movie reviews. The main character is not fun to read. I love having unreliable narrators or a challenging protagonist, but Body is just pretentious in a way that I derived no humor from. I checked on Goodreads, and this one has a lot of people listing it as DNF (Did Not Finish). I certainly felt like dropping it pretty early on. If I could give this review a title, it would be “A Long Book That Led to Disappointment.”
Continue reading “Book Update – March/April 2023”
American War by Omar El-Akkad
Would we ever be told that the United States is in a civil war, or would the government & media simply keep acting like everything was okay? My survey of things back home leads me to believe the current civil war has been raging for years. However, it would never be fought on battlefields like the war in the 1860s. Instead, it is a war akin to the ramp-up of the Troubles in Ireland or the Years of Lead in Italy. When it all explodes, it will be messy and fractious; violence is and will continue to be intra-state, urban vs. suburban vs. rural. Canadian-Egyptian journalist Omar El-Akkad has penned his first novel about a second American war using metafiction, where articles & documents from this parallel reality are used between chapters following a critical figure in the collapse.
Continue reading “Book Update – January/February 2023”
Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card…or digital access to lots of books.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – What We’ve Been Reading/M3gan”
I read over 100 books on my Goodreads challenge this year, but about half of those were probably collected editions of comics. I read some great prose, though, some of the best books I’ve read in a long time. I went back to some old reliable authors but also branched out to books and genres I hadn’t really tackled before. For 2023, I’m considering choosing an author whose work is rated very highly and working my way through their bibliography. I might challenge myself with Cormac McCarthy now that we have what are likely his final two books. That’s a hefty challenge. I was also thinking about someone like Richard Powers or exploring some female authors I’ve criminally neglected from the late 1970s/80s. On to my favorite reads of 2022.
Continue reading “Seth’s Favorite Books of 2022”
It’s that time of the year. Everyone decides to rank their favorites to show what they liked and perhaps to make you feel a little lackluster on the progress on TBR pile or wonder who has that much time to read 10 books in a month without ignoring other tasks entirely.
In previous years, I didn’t read as many books as I would’ve liked. This year? It honestly felt like two years were folded into one.
I will not put this in any specific order, just highlighting what I thought was good and allowing you to decide if it’s worth a peek.
Continue reading “Ariana’s Favorite Books of 2022”
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney is a Professor of Hitler Studies at his Midwestern college. He’s married to Babette, his fourth wife, and they live with four children to make up their contemporary, for 1985, family. Consumerism dominates the family discourse; everything is analyzed through this critical lens. The pressures of modernity manifest in the form of a toxic airborne event that threatens to kill anyone exposed to it within 30-40 years. Death is a constant theme in this family’s life despite never really coming close to it. Their fears are based more on the concepts of mortality and the idea of being the last one left and watching the others pass away. To remedy this, Babette begins taking an experimental medication behind Jack’s back that makes her immune to these morbid thoughts but also distances her from the family as a side effect.
Continue reading “Book Update – September/October 2022”
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke
The pandemic saw a revolutionary transformation of labor, specifically working from home as a viable option. This novel is told entirely through Slack chats for a New York-based public relations firm. It starts with Gerald discovering his consciousness has been uploaded into the company’s Slack channels. His coworkers think this is an elaborate prank and dismiss his calls for help. The PR firm’s most prominent job at the moment is helping a high-end dog food company recover from reports that their food may be poisoning Pomeranians across the country. We are introduced to the employee in-jokes & drama, all while bizarre things happen in the background. I thought this was an entertaining read, nothing life-changing but clearly written by a sharp mind who found a way to make an unconventional format work. Because this is essentially written like a stage play, it makes for a quick read. I knocked it out in a couple of days. If you are looking for something that isn’t fluff but also not too heavy, this one is worth checking out.
Continue reading “Book Update – July/August 2022”
Darryl by Jackie Ess
The titular Darryl is a man living in the Pacific Northwest who is going through a profoundly chaotic and confusing period of his life. Due to a healthy inheritance, Darryl doesn’t work and spends his days abusing GHB and watching his wife have sex with other men. He claims he’s a cuckold, but the other cucks on the message board he follows don’t see it that way. There is something deeply wrong with Darryl, and he doesn’t seem to realize it. Like devils & angels on his shoulder, two other men play formative roles in Darryl’s sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious revelation. Bill is a longtime friend, someone who has sex with Darryl’s wife but seems genuinely worried about our protagonist. Clive is a “therapist” brought in by his wife, who turns out to be another man just interested in fucking her. He drugs Darryl, who is more than happy to be numbed to life. Author Jackie Ess has written a brilliant, short novel about such a distinct voice. There are few books like this one, and even if you aren’t very knowledgeable about kink culture (like me), it’s a very approachable text that confronts the good & bad in people.
Continue reading “Book Update – May/June 2022”
PopCult Reviews 