Torture Porn Lit

Just read Heartsick by Chelsea Cain which I picked up looking for something else because, I think, Amazon named it the top thriller of 2007.
I didn’t altogether enjoy it — it seemed derivative (of Silence of the Lambs, although it does have the wit tacitly to acknowledge the debt when the psycho killer mockingly refers [...]

Pleasure reading

A loyal Moonraking reader (thanks Judith) asked why it had been so long since I updated.  Oddly, I checked my stats and visits have been high lately despite no new updates.  Is it all random Google visits?  Who is out there?  To be honest, I think I crave more interactivity and lately have been more [...]

Asterios Polyp

Strongly recommend this new graphic novel, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp.  It’s being hailed as a landmark of the genre, and I agree — it strikes me as among the best graphic novels I’ve read, along with the likes of Maus, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Ghost World, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, and I’m not sure what else [...]

Roberto Bolano’s 2666

We’ve been in Maine in the little cabin on Long Pond for 9 days or so.  No DSL.  My cellphone stopped working in Ellsworth.  Landline went out for three days.  I finally got it together to make dial-up work.
I associate time here in Maine with reading long novels.  Last summer I read The Magic Mountain.  [...]

Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander

Watched the first (of three, I believe) installment of PBS Mystery’s versions of the Henning Mankell Kurt Wallander thrillers.  Last night was Sidetracked and I think in the next two Sundays they’re doing Firewall and One Step Behind.
It wasn’t bad at all, was a creditable version, but was still mildly disappointing.  I didn’t really buy [...]

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Why do I love Swedish police procedurals?
I’ve already written here about my addiction to Henning Mankell’s novels.  I’ve recently gone back a few decades to the series that I believe inspired him, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck novels (they were a married couple) from the late 1960s and 70s, which have been reissued [...]

Pony, Moth, Kitten, Mouse

Two new stories.
Iris, a touching tale of the overcoming of cross-species prejudice and divisions:
One day there was a little mouse.  And the mousie once found a cat.  And the cat said that it wanted to be the mousie’s friend.  So they went to the park.  And they went on the slides for a long time.  [...]

Fatherhood in extremis: Laura Ingalls Wilder & Cormac McCarthy

I finally read The Road — almost the whole thing in one sitting in bed and then finished it off the next day.  It’s pretty harrowing.  I’ve been haunted by that recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dystopians,” about ““back-to-the-land types,” “peak oilers,”… all-around Cassandras, or doomers,” and others who believe the U.S. and [...]

Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder

I’ve been reading C&I The Little House in the Big Woods.  The Laura Ingalls Wilder books were a big deal in my family.  My cousin Laura was named after her; I read the books at least as much/often as I did the Lord of the Rings saga, in a somewhat similar pattern, too: probably read [...]

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid: Novels about the Swedish Anxiety

Henning Mankell’s The Pyramid.  I’m a huge Henning Mankell fan, have probably read at least ten of his novels, all of the Kurt Wallender mysteries, I think, and even a Linda Wallender one (his daughter).  I discovered Mankell 6 or 7 years ago — I’d never gotten so into a thriller series, and I haven’t [...]