Tenth Post: I Finished the Article

This, too:

It wasn’t until after graduation, while he was selling clothing in a rock-music store in Los Angeles, that Bock really discovered fiction, and he began a crash course in contemporary writing, following a trail of blurbs. If someone on the jacket recommended a book Bock liked, then he would immediately read the recommender’s books. Rick Moody’s “Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven” made a huge impression, and so did David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” Those writers lead to William Vollmann and Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen and in turn to older writers like John Barth, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver and to some of Bock’s near-contemporaries: Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, A. M. Homes. “I discovered there was all this good stuff out there,” he said, “and as I began to try to write, it completely changed the way I thought about character and how I was going to address the city I grew up in.”

Ninth Post: “A little old for a first-time novelist”

I haven’t even finished the article yet, but yes!:

What distinguishes the book from most debut efforts is the grandness of its ambition. It’s a first novel that wants to read like the work of someone at the peak of his career, and it has an almost Dickensian amplitude — overamplitude, some critics may say — of subplot and detail; it’s one of those novels that strive to be much more than the sum of their parts, and in which the writing is not always averse to showing off a little.

Eighth Post: Bobby Fischer

…was found dead in Iceland.

Iceland? How did Bobby Fischer end up in Iceland. There’s got to be a story in there somewhere. If only I wasn’t too lazy to find it.

Anyway, for reference, here’s an article.

Seventh Post: Catching Up (Sort of)

Well. I’m not exactly off to a good start. Also, is January 1 too early in the year to begin experiencing regret?

I have several “cultural experiences” to post on, which I will list here for my own self-reference:

What Is the What by Dave Eggers. Finally finished it.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Finished it, too.
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Actually finished it before the others.
I Am Legend, the movie.
Heidi Chronicles, the play
The Bourne Ultimatum, the movie. Twice.

There are likely others, too. For instance, I’m currently listening to the newish Dinosaur Jr. record (a term I use quite loosely, because I downloaded it), and it’s great. So there might be something there.