gregbrown

Elif Batuman The Possessed—on her adventures with Russian literature, learning Uzbek, and wild literary conferences—is fantastic and the funniest book I've read in years.

YES!!! Thank you! I was going crazy entering all possible pets and world wars into google. It exhibits the same sort of indirect control.

So cool. I want to learn processing some day just to build this kind of stuff, or like Robert Hodgin's experiments. Also whoa I am listening to that video of Robert Hodgin and he sounds scarily like Jeff Goldblum at points. Like, I'll forget that he isn't Goldblum.

Butcher's Crossing is Williams' first book, and one of the darker westerns that laid the groundwork for McCarthy's stuff. You can see him click into amazing introspective mode at the end, whereas with Stoner it's incorporated much more throughout. It's so much fun to see an author slowly build up their style. (His third book Augustus is good too, but not NYRB.) The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach is actually non-fiction—his account of an experiment trying to cure three patients claiming to be Jesus Christ by bringing them all together. But before long, the experiment is abandoned and it's a fascinating look at trying to cure mental illness through intensive human contact, along with certain measures that would be unthinkable in the modern day. There's a particular writing style that I can't quite put my finger on—maybe a sort of playful intellectualism, but without the post-war maximalist style—and Edmund Wilson has it in spades in To the Finland Station. It's very epigrammatic. Inverted World is a sci-fi novel written by Christopher Priest, one with a very curious premise that's slowly revealed throughout the book. I really need to start digging into their Russians, like much shorter mentioned.

"Seldom" isn't quite the right descriptor—given the high volume of NYRB pieces overall—but NYRB does tend to favor more non-fiction books than you'd expect, and that's certainly where their more famous pieces start from. On a side note, their NYRB imprint is simply amazing for great books that are outside of your usual stomping grounds. It's ridiculous: I can just about pick up any NYRB book at random and love it, no matter how weird or offbeat the synopsis. Part of it is picking out-of-print books that somehow missed the canon—John Williams' Stoner, for example—and part of it is being really good about commissioning new translations of incredible foreign literature. They have an incredible taste, and a distinctive color scheme that's easier to spot in bookstores. (Some of the more indie ones will even have a NYRB shelf/shrine. My favorite bookstore in Chicago had one that was NYRB + Dalkey Archive and I miss it every day.)

The source of the AOL CD anecdote. Snopes on NO PLATE Wasn't there a game where you were some world leader's pet on the eve of a world war? Or did I just confabulate that?

Worth noting here that the iOS port is now out, so you can start pressing it on "non-gamers" even more easily. Works on both iPhone (4 & 4S) and iPad (2 & 3)! http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walking-dead-the-game/id524731580?mt=8

Gordon is a wordless sociopath in the second one too, but I really dug how Breen's PSA's became increasingly strident about your rogue status and weird physicist-to-killer trajectory. One of the few touches to the game where it felt like, yep, consequences.

NBC tape-delayed the broadcast so they could "add context to enrich the opening", and inexplicably brought in their morning show pair Meredith Viera and Matt Lauer to incessantly comment on the proceedings—probably because the Today show is NBC's only steady success over the last decade. Unfortunately, while you'd expect lots of commentary during the parade of athletes since there's nothing much going on, they kept up about the same level of commentary throughout the rest of the ceremony. But since there weren't really many reactions possible outside of the most obvious explanations of what was happening, they sounded like complete idiots. (A paralyzing fear of dead-air endemic to American broadcasting may have also been at play here.) Of course, NBC doesn't care because they're making a ton of money from the broadcasts and also want to promote their other shows too, since the Olympics is one of their few toeholds into doing so (along with Sunday Night Football). It is pretty much The Worst Thing, and I regret even thinking the opening would be bearable while drunk. No more Olympics for me.

Bob Costas is mentioning insulting facts about every country that marches by. It's amazing. "Bangledesh has the largest population... of all the countries which have never won a medal."

I just began The Corrections, and by god is there a lot of Franzen's self-loathing packed into Chip. I'm only around 100 pages in, though, so it might be just a hangover from soaking in IJ (where Wallace seems to genuinely love all the characters).

A dotted outline/underline would be handy, if only to keep it from feeling amnesiac.

To expand on this, it's an outgrowth of the "write what you know" movement within creative writing programs. A unique background—whether it's ethnic, or geographical—is seen as your own edge over other writers, and a well of unique/personal inspiration. McGurl explains it a lot better than I can.

The list is just intended to survey the last 100 years.

A big omission from that list that just hit me is James Ellroy. He's often unfairly shunned from literary examination because he uses pulpy tropes in his novels, but they nonetheless represent a coherent and searing portrait of the US through the 20th century.

Chris Ware's Building Stories comes out at the beginning of October ( Amazon ). Excited!

Oh man, I remember making a Command & Conquer site on Geocities with cropped photos of each unit, and going through all the upcoming Tiberian Sun screenshots and cropping out each unit and having a description next to it and it all being in wonderful, wonderful <TABLE>s. The conversation about the Civ V reference card just caused some serious proustian flashbacks.

Fantastic book. Just finished it, and so many sequences just slammed it out of the park for me. The first real knockout sequence was and then after that there were these regular 20-page jags of amazing writing, usually delving into the backstory of these characters. The AA process of repressed memories bubbling up is such fertile ground for searingly personal writing like that, and I can't think of any other book able to accomplish the same. Maybe Murakami, though he tends to be a lot more understated and fabulist when he comes to the personal backstory jags. Long, long book though. Between the text-heavy pages and the required footnotes, I think it edges out Caro's stuff as the longest book I've ever read. Totally worth it.

Just glancing at my shelves, some of the shortest reads that would provide plenty of discussion fodder: The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason Stoner by John Williams (or Butcher's Crossing or Augustus) Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger Tinkers by Paul Harding Non-Fiction: Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders by Lawrence Weschler River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson (all highly recommended)

Descent 2 is easily the most anxiety-ridden example of this, with the Thiefbot that can steal your previous upgrades that you've spent many levels slowly accumulating. Just hearing it in the distance could shove me into total paranoia in any level—he could come from all six directions, remember—and once I spotted it, I'd often give chase thoughout the whole level, relying on my speed and dodging to avoid all the other enemies encountered during the pursuit.

Hoping that the Dunston Checks In API finds a place in the new Idle Thumbs site.

I haven't read too many full books, but I can recommend two of my favorite feature pieces. Both happen to be in the NY Times Magazine, coincidentally enough, and by famous authors: What Keeps Bill Parcells Awake at Night by Michael Lewis is a great look at football strategy from the same author of The Blind Side and Moneyball (and other non-sports books such as Liar's Poker). It's the best piece I've read for hinting at the strategic depth of the game for those not as familiar. For advanced study, check out Smart Football. Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace—in addition to being the best intro to DFW's style—is also a great look at just how great tennis players shape the game to their advantage, and how Federer seems to transcend it all. DFW wrote quite a bit about tennis, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again features an essay about Michael Joyce (an otherwise unremarkable player) where he explores the possibility that great sportsmen are being literal when they give the cliched after-game quotes. Infinite Jest also features a lot of thoughtful writing about tennis, though it's a fictional work and the tennis stuff is mixed in with everything else so I wouldn't really even call it a "sports novel" as if there is such a thing (outside of the magisterial Speed Dating).

On the cheaper side, I've been really happy with my Sennheiser HD 280 headphones—available for <$100. They're closed and don't leak sound.

Honestly, I just finished the second episode and it happened way too slowly for me. Can't wait for episode 3!

I'm getting that on the update windows in steam, but not the main interface. I think they're just slammed from the Summer Sale, honestly.