false 88 812 776 true 5630026 read 4 true 324896 currently-reading 32 true 324895 to-read 118 false 330393 comics 35 false 2117683 sf 27 false 1653098 noir 27 false 339135 food 25 false 1978557 best-books-ever-man 19 false 360145 memoir 16 false 360079 music 14 false 360160 biography 8 false 1461737 hated-it 7 false 3697985 texas 7 false 3972242 utopian-anarchist 7 false 3034556 books-of-the-city 6 false 3458576 fanciful 5 false 1857678 world-building-sf 4 false 1652659 military-history 4 false 1461763 pop-culture-criticism 3 false 360130 essays 3 false 1632260 drinking 2 false 3867313 matters-critical 2 false 1663613 about-writing 2 false 3568046 horror 2 false 3539350 feminism 1 false 1788705 french 1 false 3568047 short-stories 1 false 3482741 spirituality 1 false 3904098 science 1 false 360129 drama 1 false 7590819 typography 1 false 1483975 unfinished 1 false 3482736 american-history 1 false 373200 litcrit http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76131750 to: The Elements of Typographic Style (Paperback) by Robert Bringhurst
bookshelves: typography
Absolutely indispensable. If you want to understand how to get under the hood of a page layout, this is your Chilton's guide. It's also strangely compelling reading. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72908398 to: High Life (Little House on the Bowery) by Matthew Stokoe
bookshelves: books-of-the-city, noir
After reading this, I feel like Stokoe has just relieved himself into a wound hacked into my abdomen. And that's, in a weird way a good thing. This is a delirious, sickening novel of the nightmare hidden world of fame-addicted Los Angeles. The alternation of nausea and degradation with the surface gleam of the city's media factories hack out the rhythm of a sort of gorgeous deranged poetry, a texture that reads like the unholy union of J.G. Ballard and Raymond Chandler. This is a sick book, and I'm glad that I don't see life like this, but sometimes examining the world through an unhealthy, unholy filter is useful. I'm glad I read this, but be warned: I don't know that you will be. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11782455 Zach's review of Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library)
by Cormac McCarthy

Well, no one, actually. Not to be snarky, but it is subtitled "the evening redness in the west." ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/71387743 to: Four Freedoms: A Novel (Hardcover) by John Crowley
bookshelves: best-books-ever-man
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11555384 Andy's review of Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics)
by Donald Barthelme

But if you have them both you have one hundred. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/31696469 Nick's review of Sixty Stories (Penguin Classics)
by Donald Barthelme

Wow. You seem like a pretty intelligent feller, and you just really don't get it? I mean, no accounting for taste and all, but it just seemed like a universal to me that people who are baseline literate like Don B. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60047583 to: Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (Hardcover) by Tracy Daugherty
bookshelves: biography, litcrit, texas
It is a rare literary biography that actually enriches the work of its subject. Although reading an author like Barthelme--or any author, really--with biography in mind is always problematic, it offers yet another facet to consider in the compexities of his writing. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/53735226 to: Dark Passage (Film Ink) by David Goodis
bookshelves: noir
This book nearly gave me a panic attack. Its texture of claustrophobic dread is something to marvel over. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48041374 to: Monument (Paperback) by Ian Graham
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48041175 to: Count Geiger's Blues: A Comedy (Paperback) by Michael Lawson Bishop
bookshelves: sf
Too many half baked ideas sink this initially promising Southern superhero spoof. ]]>