The Coolest Thing I’ve Seen All Day: Kojima Survives to Live
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My 10-minute commute is 91.6% more awesome than my old two hour commute, but it also means I spend my free time upping my Gamerscore and making fart sounds in Ventrilo rather than reading a book a week. Ah well, let’s reflect on what was.
Dispatches by Michael Herr
Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, but Dispatches – a series of very personal short stories set in the Vietnam war – is widely considered to be his greatest triumph, and one of the most groundbreaking nonfiction books of the 20th century (according to Wikipedia!). The book moves at breakneck speed, pummeling the reader with a constant assault of violent imagery, begging you to try to keep up and make sense of it all and leaving you feeling as weary and
disgusted as its writer. Brilliant.
First Sentence: There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off.
Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker
The movie is better. And so is the TV series, even at its pathetically amateur philosophizing worst. The comedy mostly falls flat, and the only laughs the book inspires comes from memories of seeing the same or similar material performed with better writing and timing in the film or TV series. Every ounce of originality was mined and improved upon long
ago. I won’t be reading the dozen or so sequels.
First Sentence: When Radar O’Reilly, just out of high school, left Ottumwa, Iowa, and enlisted in the United States Army it was with the express purpose of making a career of the Signal Corps.
The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Oscar Wao is a rarity among the lady-killer men of his Dominican family — He’s a nerd. He plays Dungeons & Dragons, reads comic books and watches Anime, writes sci-fi stories, and is a hopeless romantic destined to never find love. Oscar is cursed with a fuku – the curse of doom of the new world – and he’s willing to go to any length to escape
its clutches. Absolutely shocking and heartbreaking, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is unquestionably one of the best books I’ve ever read. Just don’t read it before you read/watch Watchmen, there be spoilers ahead.
First Sentence: They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
Winner of the Book I Saw the Most Other People Reading on BART Award, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate history where Israel was destroyed in 1948, leaving the Jewish population stranded in a temporary settlement in Alaska that was just starting to feel permanent. When a child chess prodigy who may
have been the messiah is murdered right under Detective Landsman’s nose, he takes it upon himself to find answers to the questions nobody else cares enough to ask. And thanks to his stubborn tenacity he actually finds them, much to his own surprise.
First Sentence: Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.
The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
As the work of modernist author and playwrite Samuel Beckett and modern cartoonists Jackson Public and Doc Hammer prove, failure is beautiful. The Boy Detective Fails is a celebration of pulp novels, Saturday morning cartoons, and the prizes found at the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes. And failure, of course. Meno manages to depress and entertain at the same time, and fills his heartbreaking tale with amusing puzzles and mysteries, asking the reader to do some legwork (and use the decoder dial included in the back cover) to get
the most out of the experience. Fun, sad, awesome.
First Sentence: It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing.
How the Hula Girl Sings by Joe Meno
When a young ex-con and the strange, towering giant of a man he met in prison return to the small town where he originally committed his crime looking to start a new life, they quickly learn that people don’t forgive others as easily as they forgive themselves. A charming story filled with characters looking for a way to move past their mistakes, and an exploration of guilt and forgiveness that suggests the only person someone is fit to judge is themselves.
First Sentence: Out of nowhere, I did what I ought not to.
Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno
Everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves, to find a group they can apologetically belong to, but nobody more so than Brian Oswald. Set in a Chicago suburb in the early 90s, Hairstyle of the Damned follows Brian as he struggles to fit in, changing his identity as often as he changes his cloths as he tries to figure out just what “being himself” even means. Written in the pitch-perfect prose of an angsty fifteen-year-old, the book is a funny and nostalgic
look at our continuing quest to figure out just who the hell we are.
First Sentence: The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat.
Previously on The DORK Club:
Whatcha Been Readin’ Part 1
