Gustave Flaubert, 1856 The timeless tale of a neurotic housewife. The story was first released in serialized form in the Revue de Paris. It was attacked by the courts for obscenity and the resulting trial made the book all the more famous. The trial ended in acquittal and the full volume became a bestseller in... Continue Reading →
Carolyn Chute, 1985 Ghosts bust up my house all the time. They don’t hurt me…but they keep me awake rollin’ them big Blue Hubbards around and smashin’ up glass. They get right under the sheets with me and run around in there under the sheets. Set in the impoverished hills of rural Maine in an... Continue Reading →
Philip K. Dick, 1962 A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Philip K. Dick The first book I read by Philip Kindred Dick was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? My... Continue Reading →
Cruxham is a small city sprawled over three hills. It is surrounded by the massive Cruxham timberlands, the largest and last remaining in the de-forested Lowlands zone. Unfortunately, the timberlands have not made Cruxham prosperous. Soft evergreens have few uses in building, certainly no high-value ones. Their primary use, and the region’s key export, is... Continue Reading →
"The forlorn state of consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data - including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not."
Cormac McCarthy, 1985 War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. Judge Holden Three hundred and fifty pages of frontier violence and depravity. A novel about the American West that manages to avoid being a Western to the point of Anti. Essentially depicting the lifestyles... Continue Reading →
by Antonia Fraser, originally published in 1975 and edited in 2000. This one is more valuable as a reference book than for entertainment. It’s especially useful for parsing out the various Henrys and Edwards that have sat on the English throne. There’s also a clear trace of the decline of British monarchial powers starting post-... Continue Reading →
Victor Hugo, 1862 “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”Victor Hugo I knew little about this story before I read it. I enjoy musicals, but I never knew anything about the one based on this. I hadn't seen the film flops. I knew little about France besides too much of the... Continue Reading →
Frank Herbert, 1976 “Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires,... Continue Reading →
The Fancy Times 