Thought Train to Pusan

Chuck Palahniuk has some pretty interesting and insightful ideas about humans and the world we live in, but they are also pretty grotesque. “Maybe he should lighten up a little?” I think to myself. But then again, there is a demented humor to some of the biting things he writes and shows, which makes me wonder if the perversions experienced in this book aren’t strictly limited to these specific and wildly outlandish situations. Because I mean… they aren’t the crazy situations just heighten them or make them seem all the more dramatic. Invisible Monsters is a story told by a young woman who is identified by various names throughout the novel. In the opening scene, we see a house burning down on the wedding day of a woman named Evie Cottrell, who has apparently just shot a friend of the narrator named Brandy Alexander. Brandy asks the narrator to tell her her story as she lies dying in the narrator’s arms, and from there the tale of the narrator (as well as Brandy) unfolds in a n...

I started out reading John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men while picturing it as an old-timey travelling farmer story starring Walton Goggins and Hodor (hooray!). Oh, how amusing this was to me at first. And it really was the easiest way to picture the characters (with some slight changes, of course) in my head as it all went along. Until the course of the story started to fill me with worry and doubt, which ended up in just plain old heartbreak. I should have seen it coming; I did see it coming, but just like how you may watch a film even though you know you’re going to end up crying in it, I walked right into this one as well. That’s not to say that it made me intensely emotional or anything, but it kind of weighed a little heavy on my heart at the end. This could definitely be seen as a testament to the author’s abilities as a writer, and it really was a beautiful and brief story, but at the same time, I’m not sure if it was really for me at the end of all things… It is true,...

Come for the girls, but stay for the Charlie. I don’t know how I stumbled upon it, but a while back I started following Charlie McDowell’s twitter account ( @CharlieMcDowell ) which is basically just a series of little “letters” he writes to the two girls who live above him, in response to some of the inconceivably vapid comments they make. After enough time and following, it appears he decided to write a book inspired by his life under these girls, and the result is absolutely hilarious. No seriously, I actually laughed out loud at a number of parts, and kept getting asked (by my mother, yes) what exactly was so funny. What really sold me on this book was not the girls who sparked the story and the things that they say, but McDowell’s writing. I wouldn’t say that his humor is for everyone, but I personally find him to be clever and an absolute riot: a seamless blend of self-depreciation, wit, and absurdity. In terms of a story, Dear Girls Above Me begins with Charlie recou...

Thus, with this 26 th read, I finish my goal of a half-cannonball! And with half the year still to go; why didn’t I think I would make it, again? I guess I have been reading a lot of graphic novels and comic books, which don’t usually take a lot of time, and The Creep was no exception, as I breezed through the entire thing in one sitting. Partially because it is a relatively short graphic novel, and partially because I just really had to find out what happened. Suspense and curiosity is definitely the name of the game with this one, but it’s also a lot darker in what it entails than I thought it would. What we have with The Creep is what appears to be a seemingly typical detective story, after two young boys kill each other just months after one another. The mother of one of the boys calls an old friend, Oxel, to private investigate, though she is unaware that Oxel has been suffering from a physical ailment known as acromegaly, which causes a general enlargement of many physi...

Seeing as I read Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil (the first two volumes of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series) back to back, I might as well review them as one, especially since they basically just compound on top of one another in following the same paranormal threat and mystery surrounding the beast that is Hellboy. In all honesty, before starting this series, the only thing I knew about Hellboy was that there was a movie made about him a few years back with Ron Perlman, and master-of-makeup-and-costume-acting Dough Jones as some fishy thing? And Hellboy is super strong and almost like a rock or something? But you go to the odd convention here and there and hear Mike Mignola’s name being spouted around by people, and suddenly stumble upon this book and think, “Hey, why not?” And what a good random read this has turned out to be. Maybe the art is not as detailed as some might like (personally, I like things a little more minimal, and the drawings of Hellboy himself are total...