Flowery opining and editorial insight aside, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show is a great book full of truth. It’s funny, sad, and sometimes mean. Most of all, to me, it’s true. LPS finds the heart of what small town life is like, especially small town life in Texas. McMurtry probably sounds familiar, even to a casual reader. He wrote Lonesome Dove. That book, his most famous, was supposed to be his subversion of the western. Somehow, it became one of the most iconic westerns. I don’t think McMurtry ever quite […]
Mostly Stephen King, but a little bit of Adolph Hitler. Now with a Bernie Sanders reference!
The Running Man (1982) by Stephen King (3.5 stars) -not previously reviewed for the CBR Written as Richard Bachman, King’s introduction to this edition lays out his reasons for creating the pseudonym and, ultimately, killing him off following the discovery. Given his reasoning (which is basically that he wanted to try something different and test his success), I’m left wondering if King has other pseudonyms out there we don’t know about. I’ve wondered that about J.K. Rowling, as well. I’ve never really been interested in […]
A Pair of Bros in Getting into Deadly Shenanigans
I feel like I’ve been saying this about a lot of books lately, but I just seem to want more. I’ve had The Sisters Brothers stashed on my e-reader for a few years now but haven’t gotten around to reading it until now. The writing is simple and easy to follow, and the story is interesting in that I wanted to see see what wacky antics would happen as the story progressed, but I ultimately wasn’t all that engaged by it. It’s as though certain […]
When making a deal with the Devil, be careful what you wish for
Isobel has grown up in the town of Flood, in the saloon inhabited by the Old Man, the devil himself. It is known to all who live in the Territory, the area west of the Mississippi, that the devil always deals a fair hand. If you make a Bargain with him, he will give you exactly what you want, but you need to be careful you are sure exactly what you ask for. When Isobel turns sixteen, she is free to make her own way […]