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orange.jpgSOUNDTRACK: CHAVEZ-Better Days Will Haunt You (2006).

chavezz.jpgI first fell in love with Chavez when I saw a video for their song “Break Up Your Band.” I loved the video, and loved the music. And, I basically became of fan of them because of this video, which I think I must have seen on 120 Minutes, way back when. Turns out that my memory of this video is the equivalent of my memory of Good Omens (cf. Good Omens). The video is on the DVD that comes with this collection, and wow, I don’t recall the video looking like that at all! Huh, clearly I am an unreliable narrator.

Chavez is such a great noisy dissonant band. Squealy guitars, weird tempos, and noise, noise, noise. Fun! But what’s really fun is their cover of “Little Twelvetoes,” a song from the School House Rock oeuvre. This song is SO bizarre, and that’s even before Chavez gets their hands on it. The premise is that people from other planets with six fingers and toes and each hand and foot could count to twelve as easily as we count to ten. And, they made up two new numbers that would fill in the gap between nine and ten so that their twelve could be our number 10. Therefore, they could just add a zero when multiplying by 12. Or something.

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sacred.jpgSOUNDTRACK: PRIMUS-They Can’t All Be Zingers (2006).

primus.jpgSuch a great name for a greatest hits album. I’m delighted to know that Primus is still fun after all these years. How on earth they were every popular is simply beyond my comprehension.

[READ: May 2007] Sacred Games.

Here’s a link to Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games blog.

Whew, I thought this day would never come, but I finished Sacred Games, and what a trip it was! (more…)

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sacred.jpgSOUNDTRACK: A Life Less Ordinary soundtrack (1997).

life-less.jpgFor those keeping score: at lunch, I have been listening to all of my CDs in order. This process started several years ago and really bespeaks my growing insanity. I had long since finished the A-Z bands, and have moved onto soundtracks. So, yesterday’s lunch had the great pleasure of listening to the Little Mermaid, Lock Stock and Two Smocking Barrels and A Life Less Ordinary at lunch, while reading this book!)

[READ: May 2007] Sacred Games.

MADERCHOD! MADERCHOD! MADERCHOD! ! (more…)

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good.jpgokonokos1.jpgSOUNDTRACK: MY MORNING JACKET-Okonokos (2006).

[READ: Summer 2006] Good Omens.

This book is precisely what this blog is all about.

Fascinating back story: I had read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels and really enjoyed them. In fact, they are what got me into graphic novels in the first place. So, when I saw that he had written a book I thought I’d check it out. It turned out to be co-authored by some guy named Terry Pratchett. Now here’s the funny part. There is a fog on my memory. And then suddenly I am reading Terry Pratchett’s first novel The Colour of Magic in a warehouse in Cambridge, Ma. (more…)

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utterly.jpgSOUNDTRACK: MY MORNING JACKET-Okonokos (2006).okonokos1.jpg

[READ: Summer 2006] Utterly Monkey.

I have a huge fondness for British pop lit. If I go back through the years, I can see a vast number of imports: Nick Hornby, Colin Bateman, Hugh Laurie (before he was House), Stephen Fry (while he was acting with Hugh Laurie in the Jeeves and Wooster series), and Ben Elton. So, in keeping with this trend I get to Utterly Monkey. My first thought was that I didn’t remember a thing about it, but that’s not true. I remember that “utterly monkey” was a phrase meaning things were out of control. I remember it being something of a thriller with bombs and gangsters. (more…)

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lapham.jpgSOUNDTRACK: MY MORNING JACKET-Okonokos (2006). okonokos.jpg

[READ: Summer 2006] Lapham Rising.

An inauspicious start to this list, perhaps? This is the first book I journalled in my “books I read” notebook. This was read in Summer 2006, when I had a different job, and a delightful little lunch place to sit by the river and read.

To begin: this book was very short. I remember that distinctly because, as you will see, I tend to read longer books. It was described as funny, and so it was. It focused on a man who owned an island in one of those New Englandy vacation areas. His property was in high demand, and so was he, invited to do author lectures and whatnot. The book was largely about his disintegration into what would surely be madness, if he didn’t already admit to his lunacy. He talked a lot to his dog, and gave the dog human character traits which was very amusing. I laughed a few times, which is good.

[UPDATE: July 9, 2007] This review was woefully short. I want to add that the ending of the book was quite memorable, and the images of the disintegration of the character both physically and mentally still stick with me. In rethinking, the conversations and anthropomorphizing of his dog were all very funny. So, maybe this isn’t as inauspicious as I feared.

EXPOSITION: As these reviews get closer to the present I hope they’ll be more thorough, but then that’s the point of this isn’t it? Or, is the point to see which books were memorable enough to write about nine or ten months later? You be the judge.

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