Stephen King’s Under the Dome was adapted into a CBS series a few years ago. The book was good (not great) but the show was awful (not mediocre) and I hate-watched the hell out of it for some reason. That reason was The AV Club’s weekly recaps, where Joe McAlister (one of several protagonists) was […]
The beer: Stella Artois Pilsner The headline: “She saw the MAC-10 and the bitch got the shits.” – Ice Cube, “Gangsta’s Fairytale 2” The commentary: Is Ice Cube out here puffing his chest on a victory tour? He predicted Mac Jones would beat out Cam Newton almost thirty goddamn years ago. Newton was three years […]
[Mind redacted spoilers—highlight to reveal.] According to the book’s back cover, “Between life and death there is a library.” Wrong. According to the book itself, “Between a life and a near death there is a library or whatever.” Stacked there are numerous copies of Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Kurt Vonnegut’s […]
[Mind redacted spoilers—highlight to reveal—and paragraphs ending with questions.] Goodreads: Describe the book you’re currently reading in three words! Jarrod: Author inserts himself. Such is the wrong turn King made when resuming The Dark Tower after a six-year hiatus that nearly killed him. Equal time passed between the earlier third and fourth books—The Waste Lands […]
[Mind redacted spoilers—highlight to reveal.] A successful book recommendation has one key component. Author familiarity? Genre bias? Language fluency? None of these. (Maybe language.) One and only one question unites all readers regardless of taste and five-star/one-star ratios: “Is this part of a series?” If the answer is Yes and the recommendation is anything beyond […]
Imagine how this opening sentence hits after Emma Cline’s boring mopes: “The morning before the school shooting passed like any other, all my neighbors out at dawn performing oblations to the angels on our roofs.” Pow! Brenda Peynado’s world-building is impressive considering the stories’ fantastic tendencies—her effortlessness is almost Philip K. Dickensian with how the […]
[This is the first of… many?… straight-up book reviews, rated one to five stars.] Emma Cline and/or her publishing company reduces ten stories down to the middle thirds of ten stories. The opening thirds (when unlikable characters might be justified) and the closing thirds (when it’s fair to expect any progress or resolution whatsoever) are […]
Expectations cannot help themselves. Sometimes, as during a post-Trump era of adults running the show, science and public health are regarded with respect and decisions are made in order to, you know, not let hundreds of thousands of us die. So any president after Trump would be and has been an improvement. For instance, expectations […]
The beer: Uinta Bristlecone Brown Ale The commentary: Good evening! So this is what it’s like to need a first-round quarterback. Well, it’s the second consecutive year we’ve needed one, but the first time we might actually see it through. Exciting? Tonight’s is my first WordPress running diary so I might have zero readers instead […]
Week sixteen The game: Bills at Patriots The beer: True North Wee Swally Scotch Wee Heavy The result: Loss, 38–9 Week seventeen The game: Jets at Patriots The beer: Lakefront Eastside Dark Lager The result: Win, 28–14 The commentary: Where were we? Right: sub five hundred, no playoffs, Brady wins, Newton re-signs (not “resigns”). Sallah […]
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