My favorite new-year pastime, the Buffalo Beast‘s annual “Most Loathsome” list, is now up. It’s a little more brief (and tame) this year, but still a funny read.
Some highlights:
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Confessions of an Economic Hitman - Publisher: Plume
- Year: 2004/2005
- Pages: 303
I don’t recall at what point I became aware of John Perkin’s tell-all exposé on the seedy underworld of global politics, but while the idea was intriguing, it sounded a bit too exaggerated for my tastes, and I left it well enough alone. Finally, I could not resist the temptation to read this tome by Perkins, who is referred to as a “frothing conspiracy theorist” (more on this later) but praised by a multitude of readers.
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The Guinea Pig Diaries - Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 256
I became a fan of A.J. Jacobs when I read his debut book, The Know-It-All. The idea of reading the entire encyclopedia was a bit preposterous, but overshadowed by the sheer joy of trivia; I never really thought of it as an experiment per se. Things changed a bit with The Year of Living Biblically, which was a genuine life experiment for Jacobs, and one that sometimes put him in awkward positions. If you read my reviews, you’ll find that I enjoyed both, but found the latter somewhat cloying at times; Jacobs has a tendency to profess life-altering revelations or profundities which, if they are true, make him naïve, and if they are false, making him disingenuous.
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The Wild Things - Publisher: McSweeney's
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 300
Everyone does or should know about Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a seminal children’s book that has brought joy to (dare I say?) millions of childrens and adults alike—perhaps even more by adults than by children. It’s a simple story of a naughty young boy who flees to his imagination and back again, but of course much ink has been expended to justify it, parse it, explain it, and praise it, and it’s been built into more of a cultural phenomenon than a book.
Since it was already an opera and a cartoon, it was only a matter of time before it became a movie in 2009. Everyone knew that Spike Jonze (he of Adaption fame, as well as other Charlie Kaufman scripts) directed it, but what I didn’t know until well after the initial spate of movie trailers is that Dave Eggers—the writer, publisher, and philanthropist—had done the screenplay. And it wasn’t until even later that I realized he also did a novelization, which brings us to The Wild Things.
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Snow Crash - Publisher: Spectra
- Year: 1992/1993
- Pages: 480
My familiarity with Neal Stephenson began with Cryptonomicon, which at the time came much more highly recommended to me than Snow Crash. The former doesn’t quite count as “science fiction”; it was more like a techno-thriller consumed by comp.sci and technological masturbation, with a bit of historical intrigue thrown in for good measure.
Snow Crash, which is really what launched Stephenson’s career (it achieved both critical and commercial success), falls more solidly in the realm of science fiction, but it is a novel which operates on a number of levels. A great deal of verbiage has been produced on behalf of its various subtexts, meanings, influences, and reactions, so I won’t linger too long on any one aspect: further information is there for the taking.