On Kindt and Hall's "Pistol Whip"

Ultimately, I liked this book.

The problem here is that I can’t talk with my hands.

I want to speak of the noire character of the book, the dark and unknown that stays there through the end. What really is interesting is how the book can both probe deep and stay on the surface of things so that it is hard to get close to the characters, but you care deeply about them.

And here’s the hands-y part. I want to take both of my hands to describe a place in space that takes both hands in parallel facing you, and then weave them through each other. When I do it in space it feels like one of those dances someone on ecstasy does. I’ve never done ecstasy. It makes me think of that two-bits critical word I learned in grad school: “entrelacement”. But I think it is just making me drop pseudo-French and not being real. I hart that.

So, to look back, this is a book about a private eye and a dame and a radio superhero. And about none of that. And totally worth it.

On The Bus: Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"

This is one of those books I hadn’t read, but thought that my knowledge of the canon was incomplete if I had not read it. Especially considering reading bunches of Wolfe’s other fiction and nonfiction and my writing being compared to the “New Journalism” movement back in college.

This is also part of a project of mine to revisit books I had started and then abandoned some time before. I first bought and started reading this about two years ago, I was in it, but here’s a spoiler alert: there is more to the book than the bus ride (though it is the metaphor that carries through “you’re either on the bus or off the bus”). I guess I was off the bus, since once the bus trip ended and the Kesey colony started in place I felt out of place.

But I picked it back up and it ended up being rewarding because though I was looking for one arc, it ended up servicing another arc that worked. There was just that one transition period that left me cold and made me put the book down. There is a whole story about how people started trying to expand their minds in here, and the push-back against that both from the original people on the bus as well as the people who were never on the bus. It gives more depth to Kesey as a person and make him more than the author of the book that became that Jack Nicholson movie (and the author of “Sometimes a Great Notion,” a book I read 200 pages of and stopped reading 15 years ago, Maybe I should dig that up).

On Steven Hyden's "Your Favorite Band is Killing Me"

I really liked reading this book.

The format is that each chapter explores some sort of pop music feud, but even Hyden acknowledges that most of these feuds are not real (you can’t keep score except only in the crassest dollar-denominated way, maybe awards and influence but no band really goes head to head with another band).

What makes this book is that the nominal structure makes it so that the author can go off on interesting pop culture tangents.

It is like reading Klosterman fifteen years ago, before he decided to be…whatever he is now.