I picked up my daughter’s assigned summer reading today — Steven King’s On Writing and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. It’s not exactly clear to me if she’s supposed to, like, read, the Strunk & White, although I recall actually reading it when I was around her age, but I also enjoyed reading the thesaurus. The bookstore had a used copy of Penguin’s hardback edition with illustrations by Maira Kalman for only a few bucks more than the cheap paperback copies, so I got it for my daughter. I have the same edition at my office.
I finally found a copy of Jim Dodge’s 1990 novel Stone Junction. I’d been looking casually looking for it for a few years now, and was pleased to find it in a Canon edition (although the big sticker over the tarot card on the cover is kinda bewildering). If you’re interested in Pynchon’s intro you can read it here. There’s an excerpt from the beginning of the novel here.
I didn’t really mean to pick up Steve Erickson’s third novel, Tours of the Black Clock (1989) but then I did. I mean I went to the Erickson books, picked this one out, started to read the back cover, read the sentence “Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world’s most evil man,” and decided I wanted to read it.” I finished Erickson’s second novel, Rubicon Beach (1986) a few days ago and his first, Days Between Stations (1985) a few weeks ago and I guess I want more of that particular flavor.
Biblioklept 