Bill Bryson is the David Sedaris of travelogues, I think. An immensely funny writer who writes about equally interesting voyages around different parts of the world. And The Lost Continent seemed to be the perfect next entry in the pantheon “books about traveling America” road book collection I’ve amassed- American Gods, On the Road, Fear and Loathing, etc. First thing’s first, the book is really really funny. Like, every other page was met with a guffaw from me. And yes, a ridiculous amount of this book is Bill Bryson complaining. In fact, to anyone reading this who thinks they may be interested, I’ll warn you, it’s a lot of “British man complaining about how much everything sucks”, even if he does sometimes occasionally say there are things he likes, and not just so he can follow it up with a “but not anymore”. Point is, Bill is pretty funny, albeit a little annoying at times, and I find his style of writing to be pretty readable. Ultimately, an enjoyable travelogue that makes me wish I was on a road trip right now. I liked!

Junky did a better job convincing me not to drugs than any PSAs I’ve seen, I’ll say that. The You Can’t Win inspiration is VERY noticeable, because the two really are quite similar even just in style of writing. I will say, though, Junky is miles more accessible than You Can’t Win. Junky keeps you on your toes throughout its tiny run of a hundred pages. Because of its length, I’m a little at a loss for words in the grand scheme of reviewing this, but I will say it makes quite a bit of sense that Burroughs was one of the beats, albeit the postmodernism-centric one. The book is pretty ruthless in terms of its portrayal of opioid abuse- not gut wrenching per se, but certainly far from pleasant. At all points you really do want him to quit, but you remember the book’s not over. Even when the one guy warns him not to take Junk, before he’s even really done that much, you feel an extreme sense of dread. I guess dread is the driving force of this book, with each chapter leaving you more uncertain about what’s coming next. I do wish it was longer. I felt that the book would’ve been better if it was paced a little bit slower, and while I never had to go back and reread things because of missing important plot details, everything felt a little too sudden and spontaneous. Something I thought was really interesting was the wide vocabulary of junkie slang used throughout the book, maybe it’s just the part of my brain that lit up when reading the Nadsat ramblings of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, though. It’s a book that I didn’t know I wanted. In other words, I’ll definitely be reading Queer and Naked Lunch in the future.

Being able to see plays performed at any point you wish is one of the many benefits of living in the age of YouTube, as now instead of just analyzing words on a page, I can analyze words on a page while analyzing actors on a screen. This is my first review of a play, but for the sake of consistency, I might as well specify that that’s how I plan to review any plays in the future: watching a YouTube performance of the play while reading the script. For what it’s worth, seeing a live performance of Waiting for Godot- even just a recorded one- is a really enjoyable experience, given the fact that it’s not just nonsense you’re reading, but nonsense you’re seeing, acted out perfectly to the author’s plan. You actually feel the insanity of the main characters. Silence plays a huge part here too. To emphasize this purgatory of waiting eternally for Godot, the boredom, the discomfort, pauses are taken to the extreme. Also, I like the part where Lucky just starts ranting about nothing. Anyway, it’s both very funny and there’s also something very miserable about it, too. I guess that’s why its tagline is “a tragicomedy in two acts”.

American Psycho, American Idiot, American Gods, Ame- wow, people really like using American as the first of two words in their titles. Anyway, American Pastoral is like a New Jerseyan Kundera’s autobiography about the struggles of parenting. It’s a story of emotion and little plot, as the back cover is entirely described in the first one hundred pages and the other three hundred are predominantly extensive self reflection- all of this may sound like an insult to the book. I assure you it’s not. I happen to really like books like that. It’s a book that while centered around pretty much one key event (the story mostly being a reaction to it), explores a lot of themes: deception, the corruption of the American Dream (which The Swede embodies), disappointment, loss, parenting, obsession. I didn’t really think too much of it felt shoved in, either, although I thought the themes of parenting were mostly strongly enforced on behalf of Roth. Ultimately, a slow and emotional story, not one that will bring you to tears, but one that IS hard to put down. The framing device and story itself reminds me of Stoner by John Williams. Overall, I expected The Corrections (I really like The Corrections, but not enough to immediately wanna read it again), but instead got The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

“‘It’s why you kill each other, isn’t it?’ “‘Who?’ “‘Men. Because you can’t love each other.’” Every book Pynchon has written is significant to his catalog in some way. V. Is the first, Gravity’s Rainbow is his most famous, Crying of Lot 49 is his shortest, Inherent Vice has a film adaptation, Bleeding Edge takes place in the 21st century, Mason and Dixon is the only truly 100% historical fiction work of his, Slow Learner is his only short story collection, and Against the Day is his longest. Hey, wait a minute. I think I forgot a book. …Oh, I know! I forgot Shadow Ticket, which is releasing in five months. Well, I can’t imagine in what way that book will be significant yet, so might as well not include it. Oh, and Vineland. Huh. Guess that one just slipped my mind. Vineland is Pynchon’s most overshadowed, forgotten, underrated, and emotional work. Wait… emotional? Yeah. Pynchon’s work I would say makes you feel many things and expresses many emotions, yeah, but I wouldn’t call it “emotional.” I think while his writing can make you feel things, it’s rare that true emotion comes through in them. Vineland, as many have said, is weird because it’s depressing. While featuring the typical hallmarks of characters with crazy names, wacky blue comedy, strange postmodern stoner philosophy, a seemingly endless supply of knowledge in regards to obscure historical events and information in just about every category imaginable, conspiracies, and stories within stories galore, Vineland is not an ultra-weird postmodern journey into the surreal, rather a tragicomedy, 50% of it being stories told by members of the 24fps film crew. The other 50% is general Pynchon craziness, but with depressive undertones. Vineland is in some ways the hippie’s Great Gatsby: a tale of disillusionment with one’s surroundings. Vineland is a book that is meant to reflect what was the hippie generation’s failure to actually change society in a meaningful way. It’s the midlife crisis of Pynchon’s writing.