TFL #51

Books, , , ,

It’s The Floating Library vs. The Strange Library, by advice columnist Haruki Murakami. Maybe you’ve heard of him?

Murakami’s stories of ordinary people who wander into extraordinary circumstances have become somewhat predictable over the years, and his mild surrealism typically isn’t enough to rescue plots that don’t really go anywhere. Perhaps The Strange Library would be different.

Read the rest of the review here. Also, some remarks about books by Yoko Ogawa, Mary Yukari Waters and Marie Mutsuki Mockett. 

The Dirty Version

Books,

My review of The Dirty Version by Buddha Monk and Mickey Hess is up at The Fanzine. An excerpt: 

The release of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in 1992 signaled a shift in the way hip-hop was packaged and produced. While’s Dr. Dre’s blockbuster The Chronic featured clean lines and a performer who never let you forget who you were listening to, the Wu-Tang Clan’s album art featured a group of men in black hoodies and stocking caps, their faces rendered menacingly indistinct. Coupled with their dark, violent lyrics steeped in lore cribbed from Kung Fu flicks and the rhetoric of the Five-Percent Nation, they burst on the scene with the subtlety of a brick through a windshield. Their message was clear: The Wu, whoever they were, were coming for you, and you better protect your neck.

Read the rest of the review here. 

TFL #50

Books

For the 50th installment of The Floating Library, I take a look at a Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. An excerpt:

A friend of mine went into a bookstore in Los Angeles and asked the man behind the counter if they had a copy of Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. My friend had heard the buzz surrounding the film adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson, and he wanted to read the novel first. A reasonable request, but the bookseller wasn’t accommodating.

“You don’t want to read that,” he said.

Read the rest of the column here. Thanks for taking this voyage into books with me — here’s to the next 50!