Assorted reviews from the North Cascades

Yes, all I did in the mountains was a minimal share of chores and maximized my time reading trash, cooking heavily and sleeping lightly. To all whom I made an oath of work ethic, I apologize. Meanwhile, I’ll try to share what I learned in terms of wonderfully lazy reading and deliciously cheap crime novels.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell: Again, I know that Nabokov in Lectures on Literature forbade me from considering my fellow feelings in relation to the character or characters in the estimation of a novel (and I’m sure Trilling would agree), I couldn’t help but salivate over the prose, presentation and personalities of this novel. Another must-read for armchair revolutionaries.

Made from Scratch, Jenna Woginrich: Speaking of must-reads, I’ve been dreaming of a goat farm in the northern climes for some time. Woginrich managed to cross the livestock boundary with just chickens and rabbits, harvesting eggs and hair as a vegetarian stuck in Idaho at that. So add chickens and rabbits to my dream of goats and greens in some similar region of rich topsoil revealed by global warming.

The Hard Way, Lee Childs: Embarrassingly enough, I had just enough of a moment with blue-eyed, sandy-haired bestseller Lee Childs at the last Book Expo in Los Angeles to insult him by pointing out that I could finish his novels in a few hours at the family cabin. “That’s what they’re meant for,” he replied, graciously. This after talking to a librarian ahead of me in line from Montana who could probably read not only faster, but more in depth, yet was more than a full measure less awed having seen Childs at innumerable book-pimping events over the years.

City of Tiny Lights, Patrick Neate: My dear Rachel mailed this directly to Silverton, Washington at my mother’s suggestion and I couldn’t be more pleased. Patrick Neate tells the story of antihero Tommy Akhtar in colloquial London slang beautifully, reminding me how respectable Graham Greene made genre fiction for ambitious (yet deserving) literary types. More Hammett than Chandler, never mind the blurbs.

Host, David Foster Wallace: And why did nobody point me to this richly-layered, hyper-textual essay long before I started at Giga Omnimedia, much less Valleywag? I’ve long ceded that blog writing was much like that of radio and television. It’s clear I didn’t truly appreciate or entirely understand the depth of that allusion.