Chris Craddock > Recent Status Updates

I am almost finished. Really good.

I am going to read book one and then take a break so I can read Lincoln in the Bardo. I like Dune a lot, but I just want to read something else. It is like being in the desert, and it's amazing but you want a change of scenery. The scene I just read was where they see a sandworm and save some spice harvest workers, but lose a spice harvester craft. It is no surprise that Paul is a prophet, as it's foreshadowed a lot.

I am enjoying this book and it seems especially pertinent with the advent of AI, not to mention the Climate Change that could turn our world into a desert sand dune. Give me spice. The play is the tragedy man, and its hero, the conqueror worm.

It is on. I am reading Dune!

Since this is a short story collection, I'm reading this between other books. The last story was about a Russian space station that was shutting down. The guy who was the first man on Mars was so distorted from being in space with no gravity that his bones were small and brittle. He was going to go down with the ship but then some other space squatters took over and were going to keep it going.

Started today. Read 70 pages. Jonathan Lethem was described as a master of genre bending fiction, here he does gender bending as well because instead of a wise cracking hard boiled detective we have a wise cracking Harvard educated woman who quit her job for the NYT Op Ed page to protest Trump's first term election. She's looking for her female mentor's daughter who has run away & she hires the feral detective.

This book is a lot like Ocean's book, The Emperor of Gladness. Maybe I liked that one better, but it's still good.

Wow. Great.

I like this book. Good writing.

I am finished but I might make comments. Spoiler alert: It was really good. Not about a stoner. The main character is named Stoner. He's an English professor.

I am enjoying this book for the prose and the way the story is told. It reminds me a little bit of Bastard Out of Carolina.

I am buying this book at Barnes & Noble as a freind with impeccable taste recommended it.

Love love love this book. Been to Berkeley and Lethem nails it. The whole milieu is pitch perfect.

Love Lethem's prose. Partly set in Berkeley and I know these people and places. ESP and a brain tumor are intriguing aspects.

Text book for my class. What if Bach's 2-Part Invention format was used for a conversation between a lesbian and a gay man? Random excerpt I picked up upon purchasing it. The Pink Flamingo on the cover is a flaming friend of Dorothy. Bending Genre? More like Bending Gender. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT!!!!!

I have been reading this book and I have gotten to the really interesting parts where she meets Grandfather Peyote and delves deeper into Native customs. She also uncovers interesting facts about her family history, some fierce and accomplished warriors--men and especially the women. She is trying to find her path as a teenage woman negotiating between academia and the party girl lifestyle. Geronimo!

Is this an oxymoron?

One Book One Bakersfield. Memoir and Native American culture and politics.

I read it and enjoyed it. I might be pendantic was a blog where someone annotated it, and I followed the helpful notes. Fowles drops a lot of referrences, so the notes really help.

Really good. Twain level humor, a time capsule for the 60's and relevent pontification.

Dorothy Allison wrote what I consider to be a thinnly veiled semi-autobiographical memoir. She turns out to be -- spoiler alert -- a lesbian, like several of my ex-girlfriends, causing me to speculate whether I was the cause or catylist for their abrupt change. It is the white trash elegy that JD Vance wishes he could have written. Dorothy takes you deep inside Bone's world -- even if you aren't a friend of Dorothy.

Dorothy Allison wrote this, what I assume is a semi-autobiographical novel. She is molested by her step father, and spoiler alert -- she becomes a lesbian. It's a white trash elegy that JD Vance wishes he could have written. Actually, it is really well written, and Dorothy takes you inside Bone's world, even if you aren't a friend of Dorothy.

I finished this book a long time ago. It was made into a film starring Sean Connery. Not a great film, or so I hear. Enjoyed the book. A poet is quite the jerk. Is his poetry any good? It's hard to say, but once he seduces his shrink's wife, instead of a bottle in front of me, he gets a prefrontal lombotomy.

I didn't remember the movie but Sean Connery is the main character, Samson Shillitoe, a pompous poet. I wasn't picturing him because the poet is so stubborn and antisocial--he seems like an unattractive man. Like, an ugly man, like Charles Bukowski. Don't think the movie was very good but I like the book. So far, so good. Samson is not posing as a poet--he can't help it. Success at the poetry game is a crap shoot.

I am going to read this library book. Read first chapter. Tibetian buddhism with a Western slant. Oooooops. Goleman and Tsoknyl Rinpoche.

Bone has a giant grappling hook and she used it to rob a Woolworths. Her Aunt Ruth died and she has not been caught for robbing WWs. She had a friend who was an ugly albino girl named Shannon Pearl, but they had a fight. She invited Bone to a BBQ, but just as Bone was about to greet her she had an accident with the lighter fluid and was burned. The Pearl family was involved with Gospel, but only by Whites.

I am starting to admire Allison's prose style. She uses colorful similes like saying someone is ugly as a muddy road (not sure exactly but there was something similar) and also she observes body language that reveal the character's thoughts.

I was uncertain if this book was my cup of tea but now I'm hooked. Only problem is there are so many characters and relations I've lost track. Maybe I should use an index card for a bookmark and write down the names and who's who? Bone is the bastard out of Carolina, and she admits her fantasy is being tied up in a barn and covered with hay--and the barn is on fire!

Goal is to read 20 pages per day. So far it is about a girl who is illegitimate and her mother tries to get a certificate but can't because her father died before she could get married.