Beating a Dead House

So we just finished this book. It was pretty good. We bought it in the Seattle airport on Tuesday morning. The airport is where we like to buy all our books about airplanes crashing. It just fits. Anyway, the book was called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Here is a review for you. It even has a bow on it and some expensive wrapping paper.

It is a good book.

Hm, that's too short...Shall we get all loquacious and/or pretentious? Okay.

First, let us say that there are some very disturbing parallels, well, maybe parallels is to generous a word, more like identicals between the protaganist in EL&IC and the narrator of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum: both are named Oskar (Schell and Matzerath respectively). Both are relatively strange children who obsessively play percussion instruments among many other idiosyncracies. Maybe it's just a tribute to Grass, I don't know. Anyway, this review is boring. Long story short, the book uses all the classic modernist cliches, time jumps/mixed-up chronology, multiple narratory viewpoints, intentional misspelings, etc. Mr. Foer even throws in diagrams and pictures a la James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake (which, by the way is not a real book. It looks like a book but no one in recorded history has ever been able to finish it. Anyone that tells you that they read the whole thing is a liar, even your English professors. They are so just pretending). He uses these affectations to tell an interesting and well imagined story about a boy whose father was killed in 9/11. He also throws in a Vonnegutian (Vonnegut-esque? Vonnegutious? Vonnegut-like?) sequence about the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Blah blah blah we couldn't put it down, so now we're finished with it. Hm? Not enough literary references? Okay, well we suppose you could also compare it to the recent novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon in that both are written from the perspective of a precocious/disturbed child on a quest and are intentionally disorienting, probably as a reflection of the ennui/fear/overinformed/cynical/confused zeitgeist of our time. Whatever that means. We just made it up right now. Someone put us on the back of a book cover. We want to be blurbed.

Oh yeah, we also bought some CDs.

Wolfmother - Wolfmother: It sounds like Black Sabbath, the Doors, The Who, AC/DC, and the Clash went on a drunken bender and fell down six flights of stairs only to land one right on top of the other in a giant ice-cube tray and then got doused with 56 gallons of putrid, three-week old bath water. So yeah, it rules.

The French Kicks - One Time Bells: Sound like the Strokes. But the CD was only $1.99 in the used bin, so....

Van Morrison - Moondance: Into the Mystic is perhaps the best single-take song ever recorded. Perhaps.

Matador Records Thingy: Also from the used bin. It is a veritable cornucopia Jack-o-lantern (it's still October) of "popular" indie bands like Cat Power, the New Pornographers, Belle & Sebastian etc. It's not bad. We're listening to it right now infact. Our favorite is Brightblack Morning Light.


We are going to Chicago for three days next week. Look for pictures of birds. And snow.