weekend: fantastic. especially saturday and parts of sunday. brian is a happy camper. although no camping was involved. but let’s move on shall we? happy birthday again to those who deserved it.

summer reading, part one

so, should you have noticed that i haven’t reviewed a book in months and began wondering if perhaps i’d gone illiterate or just blind (brail is so hard! — not meant to be a pun), rest assured i’d just grown lazy and didn’t want to formulate lots of thoughts when i could be sharing tales of drinking and falling down, which i know is the real crowd pleaser. so to review my summer reading so far in sixty seconds or less, in reverse order of my having read them: i’ll recap what i’ve read so far with a sentence each of mine and a sentence each from the book. and the requisite stars, of course.

the fountainhead – ayn rand – 4 stars
read it because it’s a classic, and liked it despite it’s being a little obvious/preachy in its rand-ness, and i’m fine with that.

we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form.

emporium – adam johnson – 3 stars
darkly funny, occasionally brilliant, and stylishly written, but a little hit-and-miss like most short story collections tend to be.

i float out into the parking lot and watch her red taillights disappear into the night, and know that she’s right, she’s free, that nobody gets shot in the heart twice.

sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs – chuck klosterman – 5 stars
i admitted to having a writer crush on this guy a while back, and this hilariously cemented him as a favorite (and by the way, i DEFINITELY read this before seth cohen was seen doing the same on an episode of the O.C.…that guy steals ALL my style).

it does not matter that colplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band i’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of travis (who sound like a mediocre copy of radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a fucking cloudy afternoon. none of that matters.

this is only fun for me – dominic bruno – 4 stars
it’s so pretentious to rate or review the masters thesis novel of one of my best friends so why try, when i should just be excited i have a friend who wrote a book that didn’t suck even a little bit?

i realize how much closer it is to being true because i’m that much closer to dying.