Title: Wolf Totem: A Novel
Author: Jiang Rong
LC Rating:

Every once in awhile I find myself reading a book that is just so impossibly true that it depresses the hell out me and compels me to continue reading non-stop thru the day until my eyes are strained, my nerves frayed, and my sense of indignation has been brought back to the forefront to the point that I feel like screaming at people. I imagine you’re currently scratching your heads and asking how it is that someone can actually enjoy this process. I loved this book, because it’s not just a book; it’s a weapon.

Title: Chronicles: Volume One (Chronicles)
Author: Bob Dylan
LC Rating:

It’s a nice thing, every once in awhile, to be reminded that no matter how tuned in you think you are, that there’s a whole lot of interesting stuff going on outside your notice. That’s my way of excusing myself for not realizing that Bob Dylan was in the process of writing a three-volume set of memoirs. Chronicles: Volume One actually came out in 2004; I heard about it on Sunday, picked it up yesterday and finished reading it this afternoon.

Title: Only Revolutions: A Novel
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
LC Rating:

Ok, fair warning first: Having previously thought that Danielewski’s first novel House of Leaves was the strangest form of book I’d ever held in my hand, I have since been shown the error of my ways. Hands down, Only Revolutions takes the cake. From concept to execution, this is a very interesting artifact.

Title: Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
Author: Daniel Pinchbeck
LC Rating:

This is for the cognoscenti;
the discerning eye.

big shout to talking plant
for bringing this tome to my attention

This is not ground to be entered lightly.

Title: Adverbs: A Novel
Author: Daniel Handler
LC Rating:

I only put this book down last night because I literally could not keep my eyes open anymore. Then I woke up, made an omelet and finished reading Adverbs. Daniel Handler delights in language, and plays with it liberally. What’s so impressive is that it never becomes intrusive or confusing; and that is really saying something about a novel told in short chapters where there is simply no way of knowing if the Andrea you are currently reading about is the Andrea from an earlier chapter or some new person entirely; at times each will seem plausible.

Title: Between the Bridge and the River
Author: Craig Ferguson
LC Rating:

I had some significant doubts before entering in this book, after all Craig Ferguson is a minor celebrity, apparently the host of the Late Late Show; never watched it. The truth is that I was in a bit of a hurry at the library, and the inside cover caught my interest to the point where I figured I’d give it a chance; I’m very glad that I did.

This wasn’t written to convince anyone of anything
This wasn’t written to be a great work or to explain anything

This was written because I had to write it
This was written because I hope someone will read this, and be reassured
This was written because writing is so often all I have . . .
In these modern times.

I swear it’s not doom and gloom, and I hope you’ll agree with me.
-finite (do me a favor and play along) jester

Finally! After far too long of a wait, I finally got to hear Zaireeka the way it was meant to be heard: playing on four stereos simultaneously. This is no mere album, this is an experience.

I’m a music fanatic, but today I haven’t had any interest in listening to any music, simply because I’ve still got the tones of Zaireeka floating in my head. At turns haunting, hypnotic, beautiful and disturbing; Zaireeka is . . . well, before I find myself simply gushing out tired clichés of praise, I’ll just say that . . . . Zaireeka is quite simply incredible.

When you devour 700+ pages in less than twenty-four hours and your dreams take a turn of such tangential oddness that a careful consideration of the themes involved leads you somewhat surprisingly, yet inexorably, back to the bound stack of paper that first entered your awareness as Mark Z. Danielewki’s House of Leaves; well, when that happens . . . you know that you’ve encountered something special.

This particular book was so good that I’m a bit of quandary as how to begin this review. In truth, I finished Robert Hellenga’s Philosophy Made Simple almost a week ago, and have been sitting on this review, uncertain of the best tactic to encourage all interested parties, or indeed to spark interest in those disinterested, to read this.

As I read The Brief History of the Dead I found myself consistently twisting between the position of loving and disliking this book. Now that I’ve finished it, I’m perhaps more confused than I was while I was reading it, but I can’t seem to get my mind off some of these ideas, which can only mean that Kevin Brockmeier was doing something right.

Ok, to be totally truthful, it is seldom that a product will get a five star rating from me. I have very high standards that I set for most objects and in this day and age the engineering is often overlooked in order to have more money for marketing.

A few months ago I lost my camera. It has and will continue to be much debated issue as to how this camera was lost (I blame my son, my wife blames me) but regardless, it was found last night.

Why has no one been so kind as to inform me that Jonathan Carroll writes books like this? I happened to pick Glass Soup up off the library shelves on a whim, and about half-way into it began wondering how the man could have published fourteen previous books without me having stumbled across them.

It’s a rare book that can make you shudder, make you grip its pages a little too tightly and actually curse with disgust at the actions of its characters. This is a rare book.

In You Remind Me of Me Dan Chaon tracks the different destinies of one incredibly tangled family. The story is told through a broken chronology, where we get to dip into Chaon’s reality at a number of different years, and slowly the connections of the characters emerge.

Here at Lewd Cognoscenti we like to consider ourselves writers. Everyone on the staff has long harbored dreams of some sort of literary accolades, or at the very least putting a novel into print.

Well, there’s this idea that talking plant and I have been batting about for awhile, and the other day the concept of putting it into a novel came up and quickly became a necessary evil for us to attempt; truthfully I think it’s just another damn good excuse to engage in a little friendly competition and in the process spur each other into actually writing a book.

I can say without hesitation that Paul Auster is one of the finest novelists writing today. I had the pleasure of being introduced to his works about ten years ago and have faithfully read every word I could find that came from his pen. He weaves such elaborately beautiful plots, and his characters live in ways that belie their status as mere words; but the true beauty of Paul Auster’s writing is his tone. Opening a book by this man is more like settling into a comfortable chair and having an incredibly charismatic story-teller sitting just inside the range of your hearing.

Douglas Adams; undoubtedly a member of the cognoscenti, and taken from us far too soon. If you haven’t yet read the body of work that he left to us, then by all means rush out and do so. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and all the books that followed are wonders of how philosophy can be disseminated through humor. Damn good reads too.

What is it about Thomas Pynchon? I think a good place to start would be the confession of more than a simple smattering of envy, the man writes sentences that simply explode across the page, dipping, turning, weaving and bobbing; tackling so many myriad tangents that it sometimes amazes me that you can even follow it, and truthfully I have talked to a few people who claim that you can’t.

The more I read of Tim O’Brien, the more I respect his gift for the craft of writing. Not merely the way he can create an aura of tension which explodes in a simple phrase, or his knack for finding the right words for description; In the Lake of the Woods features a description of a character “building” a vodka tonic, which is perfectly suited to the tone of the moment. These things alone would be nearly enough for me to climb onto this soap-box and claim O’Brien as genius, but it the way that he draws attention to things like memory, the art of storytelling and all the little sins we cannot help but commit as humans that force me to rank him as one of the best authors currently at work.

The best short stories have something about them, a tightness, a sparse sense of prose that still allows for moments of lyricism. Dan Chaon has got the art right, Among the Missing is composed of an even dozen stories and there were only two of them that felt less than wonderfully fulfilled.

All the stories live firmly in the real world and yet manage to venture off towards all manner of strange possibilities without once stretching your sense of believability, although you do occasionally wonder how much you can trust what the characters tell you.