Rob Atkinson > Recent Status Updates

Need some good literary junk food to get me through this trying time.

Funny how bizarre or unlikely correspondences arise in my reading...’Kismet’ or sensibility I don’t know. I’ve been reading the fin de siècle’s French decadent writers, in particular the rather obscure (these days, anyway) Jean Lorrain, lately, and now a favorite author of my youth Julian Barnes produces a bio-history of his scene! Just received my copy and it’s beautifully mounted too.

Gripping true crime I expected and got: but a bonus here, Corey Cep writes like an angel. She constantly delivers striking lines. So far little of Harper Lee but it was a project she was working on...in the early 70s, perhaps she was looking for her own “In Cold Blood”.

I’ve read some of the poor reviews that suggest this is patting whites on the back for having some “Good Ones” in the mix are missing the point. The picture is overall an ugly one, and sadly one that still persists in places. Lee’s sympathies are clearly with it’s a book that hopefully will speak to the Ewell’s modern day adherents, if not the Ewells.

Unbelievably I never had this assigned in school. I’ve always wanted to read it, and now’s the perfect time as my brother got tickets to the Broadway version for my birthday along with (by request) the novel! Thanks Sam!

I bought this over a decade ago at the Book Barn in Niantic, CT, great used bookstore dedicated buildings for each genre...anyway picked it up as I’m a Dada scholar and know a lot about Surrealism. So the title: a blind collaboration on paper between artists is a “cadaver équis” looking now its very well reviewed, and I’m glad. Often my favorites are things I bought on impulse years ago that have been languishing

Slightly pedantic at times, unless you’re an historical re-enactor, but still lots of fun naughty bits.

My spooky Halloween season read for 2018; cited by a number of great writers in the press recently as the scariest book they’ve ever read, so looking forward! Jackson’s “The Lottery”, which I read in High School, haunts me to this day, so my expectations are high.

Great pulpy mystery with a real sense of place, set in 1929 Berlin, loving it!

Delicious so far, solid pulp fiction mixed with more literary examples, and all unfamiliar. Won’t be able to put this down until the end, though it’s eminently browsable. Best so far: “The Shadow of Quong Lung” by C. W. Doyle, amongst half a dozen other stand outs.

So far Smollett is reading like a proto-Dickens, but far more lurid and profane. Ergo I think I've found a new favorite! I gather he was the 'guilty pleasure' author of 18th c. England and I can see why...

Forebodings. Two pages in and it's reading like a Harlequin Romance.

Yes "It Can't Happen Here" is strident and heavy handed in the manner of political 1930s social realism, and its hardly a masterpiece of writing... but it's easy to see why this title has seen a surge of interest lately along with '1984'. Though grounded in the American political scene of the 1930s, the parallels to the Trump campaign and the current zeitgeist are truly uncanny.

Already encountering sloppy editing, a big pet peeve of mine...misused punctuation, misspellings...even spelling Sir Thomas More's name "Moore". A great pity as the content has been interesting.