If you are reading this message, it means that I am already gone. Back to Indiana for grad school. Contrary to popular belief, people do enjoy books in the Midwest, and before I left I wanted to encourage y’all to read my very favorite. Cat’s Cradle is an astonishingly perceptive take on the danger-fraught relationships between knowledge, power, organized religion, and responsibility. It’s also a family drama, more astute for its caricature—the most cheerfully wise and devastatingly funny novel from my favorite Hoosier author.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe Dial Press
Our Price: $16.00
As In Cold Blood is considered a non-fiction novel, so could The
Bonfire of the Vanities be called a fictional piece of journalism. With
a reporter's keen objectivity, Wolfe chases his imagined subjects through
the streets of a greed-ridden 1980's New York City. The often despicable
characters are described with hyperactive attention to detail that is
simultaneously tedious and exhilarating. Wolfe's first novel is gleefully readable and was probably best endorsed by John Updike, albeit unwittingly, when he said the novel "amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form."
Conversations with Tom Petty
by Paul Zollo Omnibus Press
Our Price: $24.95
I remember being a middle school outcast as my friends started to get into music. My preppy friends related to Hootie and the Blowfish and their brand of "Golf Rock." The disillusioned opted for Nirvana and the sappy preferred Boyz II Men. I felt left out until someone played me a copy of Tom Petty's Wildflowers. I had finally found my niche: Loser Rock. Conversations with Tom Petty, a collection of interviews with the barroom bard, gives insight into the origins of Petty's uniquely defiant optimism as well as his penetrating critiques of the rock star lifestyle. As Petty rocks into his sixth decade, it is important to remember that even people like me get lucky sometimes.
One-Letter Words: A Dictionary
by Craig Conley HarperCollins Publishers
Our Price: $16.95
I'm a smart guy, but I must confess that I could not have come up
with thirty-four definitions for the letter G. So thank goodness for
Craig Conley, the ultimate man of letters. His 230-page joyride
through the English alphabet reads like a Scrabble dictionary on
steroids. Giving due deference to every building block of our
language, Conley does for letters what James Merrill's Body
did for words. This book provides for fascinating reading from
A (To not know "A from B" is to be ignorant) to Z (A hypothetical explosive, more powerful than an A or H bomb).
