Reading Update...

Runaway American Dream: Listening To Bruce Springsteen (2005) by Jimmy Guterman

Sample quote: “The rock ‘n’ roll era ended some time between the release of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Ragged Glory and the death of Kurt Cobain, roughly around the same time ‘hot topic’ changed from something exciting to talk about to the name of a retail chain in shopping malls that specialized in goth and metal fashion. When someone in purple hair, covered with tattoos and sporting a safety -pin-pierced cheek smiles at you in a Hot Topic store and asks, ‘How may I help you, sir?”, the co-option of rock ‘n’ roll culture by commercial culture is pretty much complete.”

Reading Update...

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres (2005)

Scheeres attended my high school (Harrison High School in West Lafayette, IN) five years before I started there. Part of this memoir is about her time at Harrison H.S. "Weird" is the best word that I can think of to describe the experience of reading a book written by a person that attended my high school at almost the same time that I did. "Weird" and that is for sure.

Music Update...

Ringo Starr's Y Not (2010)

Best Song: "Can't Do It Wrong"

Reading Update...

The Sorrow Of War: A Novel Of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh (1993)

This novel is written by a veteran of the Vietnam War that fought with the North Vietnamese Army.

Sample quote: "He wrote, cruelly reviving the images of his comrades, of the mortal combat in the jungle that became the Screaming Souls, where his battalion had met its tragic end. He wrote with hands numbed by the cold, trembling with the fury of his endeavor, his lungs suffocating with cigarette smoke, his mouth dry and his breath foul, as all around him the men fought and fell, one by one, with loud painful screams, amidst loud exploding shells, among thunderclaps from the rockets pouring down from the helicopter gunships."

Movie Update...

Strange Brew (1983)

I read that this film is supposed to be based on Hamlet.

Reading Update...

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006)

Sample quote: "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

Reading Update...

War Is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared To Death In The World's Worst War Zones by David Axe and Matt Bors (2010)

Sample qoute: "We are a world at war, sometimes quietly often not. We are the cleverest monsters, and we deserve everything we've got coming."