Oh boy, it's time to anger readers. Written brilliantly—and I mean in true, searing brilliance—Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" is a magnum opus of a different time, its meteor strike so violent as to deform its later receipt in ruddy, jagged ways. This
It's been far too long since I last wrote and while I can blame some of the delay on the impending energy crisis, the country's self-inflicted war wounds, and whether a head of state's recent public appearances are actually AI (???), there's actually
Reading any universally agreed-upon "classic" brings predictable anxiety. What if it's bad? Worse, what if it's boring? Worst (!), what if it doesn't matter??? But, notwithstanding a few eye-rolling decisions by Mary Shelley in her 200-year-old sci-fi progenitor (she cites her husband'
It's good to, once in a while, read something bad, especially when others insist it's great. Ben Shattuck's collection of short stories, "The History of Sound," is just that—serviceable writing that has received heaps of praise since its 2024 release (The
I haven't read a book like this in two ways: * In years, when I last devoured a text in 80-page sprints, completing the work in less than a week (the last time I accomplished this near osmosis was more than 15 years ago with "100 Years of
It's healthy to appreciate small wonders—even corporate ones—and the truth is that I'm in receipt of a rare privilege where, strictly though my work, I'm allowed to read a book, write questions of its arguments, and then discuss those questions directly with
There's no comfort in the resonance struck by Roberto Bolaño's experimental, 120-page, one-paragraph (yes) novella "By Night in Chile," which unspools as a confessional from a dying Chilean priest confronting his guilt for the role he played in failing to fight—and at times
Weeks after Donald Trump's re-election guaranteed four more years of library antagonism (book bans are a decidedly rightward trend), book-lovers got even worse news: Cormac McCarthy had been somewhat of a pedophile, and the details had been delivered by an oaf. There is bad writing and then there
"Screentime" is time spent strictly on my iPhone. My job puts me in front of a laptop every day and celebrating a count of eight hours instead of nine is unwarranted. I'm also not obsessive about Apple's "Screen Time" feature, and a
ScreenSaver is a weekly (at best) newsletter about any reading I do outside of my smartphone or laptop, a small chronicle of my attempts to save myself from a screen. It began with an act of self-sabotage. After failing to reduce my daily screentime by removing the apps for Facebook,
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Reading anything after "Gravity's Rainbow" was always going to be a tussle—what can compare with receiving The Gift of Sight?—but Patricia Lockwood's semi-autobiographical account of battling Long COVID was an especially poor contestant to bet on. This book sucks piss right out
I don't know how to talk about this book like a normal person because there's no normal person who remains after reading this book. But!, there's value in plain-speaking (a lesson desired especially in these past six months), so let's dispense: "
Forgive me Web, for I have sinned. ScreenSaver spent so much time worrying about the Little Screen (iPhone) that it was defenseless to the Big Screen (TV), so when two videogames released back-to-back, reading got shunted off and shooting demons (Doom: The Dark Ages) took center track. But! The demons
It's taken me about four weeks to process Omer Bartov's article "Infinite License" in The New York Review of Books because what it deploys is a moral clarity so genuine and firm that it's almost disorienting in today's media landscape.
I visited Estonia last week for work and came back to a wedding, a time crunch, and illness. And though I read a great deal these past two weeks ("I didn't know anyone read Pynchon after college" said my 80+ year-old Berkeley grad seat mate, Go
Already a chill should spider down your spine at the idea of anyone having to read David Brooks, but of the dreary pieces in the latest issue of The Atlantic (which included a suspiciously timed profile of Ringo Starr (this and the announced casting for the Beatles biopics within the
I have very little to say this week because I've been caught entirely by this small moment in "Gravity's Rainbow," where Webley Silvernail speaks so tenderly to the caged mice that his unit experiments on. He tells them: "I would set you free,
In "The New York Review of Books," (which is still printed in a charming and fatass 10½ x 14½ format) Nicole Eustace raises important questions about history-telling in her review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s nonfiction book, "Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America." Hämäläinen’s
I didn't read shit this week. ...Okay, that's not 100% true, but what I did read has already been covered, and the world really, really doesn't need another "Gravity's Rainbow" blog because, perhaps unsurprisingly, there are already many out there—
Last week I learned that William Faulkner wrote a collection of six short crime mysteries that all feature his own Southern Gothic version of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot—a "Gavin Stevens" who serves as the prosecuting attorney for the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County outside of Jefferson, Mississippi—
This week, after being sent nearly into a coma by a never-ending stream of AI-enabled, Studio Ghibli-fied normie wish fulfillment ("Here's me as someone interesting!" they cheered), I read a review in The Atlantic about the non-fiction book "Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children,
The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, revealed this month that the company had trained a new artificial intelligence model that is "good at creative writing," and, predictably after posting the model's handiwork, everybody made fun of it. we trained a new model that is good at