What I've been reading

Hello? Anyone out there? Anybody still read this blog?

I can't say I blame you if you've drifted away, what with my once-a-month updating.

My brother e-mailed me the other day asking if I was going to post about my family's recent trip to New England. His querry prompted me to think about my blog for a change, and I realized that it still had that putrid Daniel Handler book Adverbs listed in the "on my nightstand" section. Ugh. That book is the worst piece of shit I've read in years. It's like: What if you took a Neil Gaiman script and had it turned into a novel by Dave Eggers? It'd be terrible, that's what.

I'm really sick of stream-of-consciousness gibberish and other purposefully-crafted sloppy literary techniques being lauded as genius (and I'm not just speaking about Handler here, Safran-Foer, for instance, also comes to mind). It's not genius. It's a pain in the ass to read. I've got better things to do than muddle through some author's artsy attempt to look smart. Punctuation and grammar rules are there for a reason. They turn words into comprehensible sentences. Throw them out the window, and reading becomes a chore instead of a pleasure.

Currently, I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and it's fantastic. I'd been meaning to read it for years, but other things just kept pushing their way in front of it, somehow. It's about two Jewish kids in New York who create a superhero during the Golden Age of comics. The book paints a fascinating image of what the comic book industry was like in those days — so I'm getting a lesson in comics history along with the fictional storyline. It's really stirred up my passions to start reading comics again.

Ah, yes. That's where the quality literature is to be found.