“MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT the quaint and lumbering buopoths native to the Exilic Lands and other curious places – but to this day, little remains understood about the shy beasts beyond the proverb that ‘they will haul all day…
Tag: books
My first best friends.
First Graf: The Dharma Bums
THIS IS THE ONLY NOVEL ever recommended by a friend who told me, “Neal, we’re in a book.” (It’s also the first Kerouac work I ever read.) It was 1981, and my friend and I were going through our Dilettante…
First Graf (well, page): Harold and the Purple Crayon
THE FIRST BOOK I EVER read from cover to cover was Crockett Johnson’s 1955 work, Harold and the Purple Crayon. If you’re not familiar with it, it goes like this: A small boy in one-piece pajamas draws with, well, purple…
First Graf: The Histories
WERE IT NOT FOR HERODOTUS — lauded as the “Father of History,” derided as the “Father of Lies” — we would know nothing of, among other things, the tale of King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans and how it affected…
“NaSSWriMo!”
TODAY KICKS OFF THE WOULD-BE novelists’ annual motivational event, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day for a total of 50,000 by November 30. (I participated one year, and have a fairly mediocre…
It’s Really Spelled “Hallowe’en”
(TO BE CLEAR, IT’S ACTUALLY a slight abbreviation of the phrase “All Hallow’s Evening,” AKA “All Hallow’s Even,” AKA “Hallows E’en.”) There’s something to be said about archaic or alternate spellings / renderings. For example, a beloved English teacher once…
First Graf: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
ACTUALLY, SINCE T.A.o.S.H. IS THE first published collection of all Sherlock Holmes stories, here is (also) the First Graf of “A Scandal In Bohemia,” being the first of the tales in said collection. It’s unfortunate that Sherlock Holmes has become…
First Graf: On the Road
HAVING FIRST (AND LAST) READ this shortly before a 1985-6 cross-country hitchhiking-and-bus-adventure, I’d forgotten how good it was until beginning to read it aloud to The Partner recently. A rollicking, crying-out-for-emulation 1957 work, what strikes me about it now is…
Larry Niven Calls This “The Funniest Prayer in Literature”
TUCKED INTO MY INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH siddur (prayerbook) is the following supplication. It’s there to keep me riding the trail of Faith without falling into the trap of thinking I know everything — or, really, anything — about that-which-some-people-call-God. Ladies, gentlemen, friends,…
Why I Love: Robert Anton Wilson
IT’S THE WAY HE BLOWS my mind. It’s the way he mixes conviction with doubt. It’s his searingly funny prose. It’s his search for Ultimate Relativity. It’s that he taught me some important Latin phrases, like “Cui bono?” and “Non…
First Graf(s): The Fellowship of the Ring
IF YOU HAVE ONLY SEEN the movie version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you are missing out on an extraordinary literary work. Granted, it takes a while to get into — a criticism also (and often) leveled against…
First Graf: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
THIS WAS THE FIRST FANTASY I ever read — at the tender age of six or seven, IIRC — and remains one of my most beloved and oft-quoted books. In some ways it’s similar to Bullwinkle or SpongeBob Squarepants: touted…