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I read this book. This was the “follow up” to With the Old Breed, which is the greatest first-person account of war I’m aware of. It was written by the same guy, Eugene Sledge. Unfortunately, it turns out that 100 pages of musings about sitting around in China after the war isn’t quite as gripping [...]

I finished it, so it couldn’t have been that bad. And yet…: For a book with a theme I identify with (i.e., people being born into lives not of their choosing and then having to deal with it), it seems like I should have liked it a lot better. The main character sucked. I mean, [...]

My two current writing projects that I’ll never complete are: Writing the last great World War 2 novel. Writing the first great asteroid mining novel. I needed some vernacular to move ahead with #2, and I found this book (The Making of a Hardrock Miner by Stephen Voynick) on Amazon. It’s very good. It’s a first-person [...]

Was reading Angle of Repose when I was in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago (the house-hunting trip) and realized where/when I’d last read it: when I was moving to NYC back in 2005. I remember sitting in the airport in Cincinnati (where I was making a connection on Delta) reading it and thinking it was [...]

The *truly* impressive thing is that I finished it. Good: Steinbeck writes very cleanly. Probably a useful depiction of a slice of life during the Great Depression (although… well, see below). Makes me glad I wasn’t a destitute farmer in (fictionalized) California during the 30s. Bad: I swear there were blocking problems everywhere in this [...]

It’s been a few months since I read these two books. I liked Deliverance a lot and found On the Road insufferable. More interestingly maybe, the two books seemed to be about the same thing: discovering real life through voluntary suffering. Deliverance, of course, would be the more middle-aged model and On the Road the [...]

A little unfair in that, in fact, I’m surprised they included so many novels that I don’t think suck. Also unfair in that I’m not sure I can confidently name more than 15-20 novels that, in my mind, don’t suck. And that I haven’t read most of the list. Ah well. I also appreciated Game [...]

Norman Mailer wrote it. It was ranked #61 on the Modern Library 100 Greatest Novels list. Many have called it the greatest novel ever written about World War II. I have to say, the competition doesn’t seem that stiff. Oh well. Pros: Really long. Makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something. Sure, it’s a pyrrhic [...]

(Vince, you out there? How’d I do on my conjugation?) Closed shop on my spec-fic literary magazine dream. Officially. It’s probably been dead since last summer — at least, in my heart. I feel bad for holding onto some stories over that time. It’s probably not the biggest crime ever committed by an editor, but [...]

(Assuming he submitted it as an unpublished writer of course.) How did the planet get like this? How long have they been walking? How old is the boy? How old is the man? Where are they exactly? Why is it always cold? How did they survive whatever happened? What are the bloodcults? (*They* sound interesting [...]