Comments on Reading Tonight

another motherfucking book about a ‘freethinking’ dog.

What other ones have there been?

Aside from Jonathan Livingston Pitbull, of course....

Well, there's Marley and Me, and the sequel to Marley and Me, and Good Dog. Stay. and the Bedlam Farm books, and a buttload of other dog books that have come out in the last two years. They're all like Tuesdays With Morrie starring rude dogs, and people buy them as though the pages were made of candy powdered with delicious heroin.

I downloaded Little Brother but gave up after a few chapters. Seems like The Golden Compass is much more readable. Are they aimed at the same age level?

Mostly I was annoyed at how his elaborate programming and scripting hacks always worked perfectly the first try. I thought he was supposed to know something about how technology works but he makes it seem to think it all happens like magic.

You need to stop reading those kinds of books.

Hemingway was a great writer when he started, but his philosophy and mythologizing are garbage. Books aren't "true"; if anything they are spectacularly false. That statement would read more truthfully if it said "so false they changed you". Truth is a stupid goal. And Dostoevsky, in as much as you're reading him when you're reading his translations (which isn't much), is a stupid novelist.

A much more interesting criterion for a novel is "a breathtaking lie".

And people who read books about wise dogs should be electrocuted.

Mothers are being fucked in this book?

What?

It's all fiction.

I'll be attending one of the glossed-over readings, and I'll be pre-funking in the car.

Paul @2,

You forgot about last year's urban-legendary dogliophile best-seller, Achieve Financial Independence By Cultivating Your Third Eye--And Your Dog's Third Eye, by Cesar Millan with Deepak Chopra. All twenty in attendance at the reading at Borders downtown brought their pit bulls and their hologram crystals. Man, what a crazy scene that was. How could you forget?