Last year I listened to NPR cover a story written in The New Yorker about translator-professor-ethnographer Daniel Everett. As these things sometimes go, the New Yorker article was a partial review of Everett’s book Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes, and a partial overview of Everett’s life and the controversy he’s generated in the field of …
Continue reading Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes — Not a Bad Piece of Nonfiction!
Our book club had a Christmas party. And confession: neither Leah nor I read the book. It was The Which Way Tree, by Elizabeth Crook. From reading the back, and from what I heard, it’s a retelling of Moby Dick in the Western style, with a woman trying to track down and kill a panther …
Continue reading Traditional Holiday Book Club Gift Exchange Party
I ALWAYS finish books. I've read a lot of good books, and I've read a lot of less-good books. And to be clear, I like holding on until the end, because a novel or collection of stories or whatever that may initially not be so hot might have some redeeming quality by the end. But …
Continue reading The First Book I’ve Ever Failed to Finish: BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
Something Wicked This Way Comes is the best Halloween book ever written. Also (since that’s somewhat of a narrow category), it is one of the best all-around books ever written. And I truly think that Something Wicked is Ray Bradbury’ best. In fact, I’m kind of shocked at times when people tout Fahrenheit 451 as …
Continue reading It’s October — Time to Read SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES!
The last post was Leah's favorite children's books. Part of what got us on the subject was our two-year anniversary, and we begun reminiscing. And then I was like "Paper! That's what you give on your two year anniversary!" And paper relates to books, so.... Anyway, I'm not sure who sets these things, but if …
Today, Jeff and I are celebrating our 2 year wedding anniversary. In the spirit of reminiscing, we will be writing back-to-back posts here on Batch & Narrative about our favorite children's books when we were little. Here are mine: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak Horton …
All You Need is Kill is an awful name for a novel. Written in 2004 by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, this is the book that was later turned into the 2014 film Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. Now, here are two facts: First, Edge of Tomorrow is one of the best science fiction …
Last weekend Leah and I hosted book club. The food we provided was “meat on a stick,” since we just read the late Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. As Bourdain makes clear time and again, almost nothing is better than meat on a stick, and indeed, the recipe Leah made was delicious. So check that out …
So, is slipstream fiction a genre? As I first wrote when starting to read Feeling Very Strange, an anthology that tries, in part, to exemplify just what slipstream fiction is… I don’t think it is. I’m not sure if there are any stories here that don’t already fall under the regular speculative fiction umbrella, and …
Continue reading Feeling Very Strange: A Fantastic (Scifi?) Short Story Collection
I’ve just about wrapped up the short story collection Feeling Very Strange, which I wrote about a little earlier. Before a big talk about the book, here’s a standout worth mentioning: “Sea Oak” by George Saunders. If you recognize that name, he’s the guy who wrote Lincoln in the Bardo (2017 Man Booker Prize winner), a …
Continue reading “Sea Oak,” a Story (and a Cancelled Amazon Show) from Feeling Very Strange
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