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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
JeffCrook has commented on (2) products
The Road
by
Cormac McCarthy
JeffCrook
, November 10, 2006
I've read my share of books, and I've read some of the scariest books ever written. Although this isn't horror in the traditional sense, I've never been so scared reading a book as I was reading this one. There were times when I just had to put it down and walk away from it, sometimes for days at a time, but it haunted me in the intervals. I'd get all knotted up inside reading this book, and that has NEVER happened to me before. I have never become so emotionally attached to characters in a book. I've never lived in real dread of what is about to happen next in a book of Fiction! The only thing that comes close to this is eating really super spicy food that so so good to eat, but so painful that you have to steal yourself and build up your courage to take the next bite. However, I'm only giving this book four stars because I feel like the ending is somewhat of a cheat. I won't give away the ending, but it just seemed a bit too damned convenient. That's always the problem when an author builds a truly hopeless situation or impossible quest or unsolvable riddle - it's so good that even the author can't solve it, and that's what happens here. There's no good way to end this book. It ends well, but only after a bit of deus ex machina.
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We Are a Billion Year Old Carbon
by
Corey Mesler
JeffCrook
, September 29, 2006
When I picked up this book, I wondered what Corey Mesler could possibly have to say about the 60s that hasn't already been said a thousand times before. I mean, this book, on its face, seems to be about ten years too late. But from the very first, you realize that it's written in a rare language. I open the book and a little piece of paper falls out. What?s this? A receipt? Yes, it?s a receipt for all the quotes the author includes in the book, acknowledgment of his Muses in a disposable Homeric. It?s a work?s cited insert. I decide it will make a handy bookmark. Like beer in bottles, this is brilliant. In days to come, the book collectors will ask, yes, but does it have the original insert, and if it does, the value of the book will double. In the first pages of Johnny Niagara and the Bible of Dreams, Corey flails us with language. He shows us his mastery of thesaurus.com. He should post a link and charge for advertising. My God. He is a language drill instructor as we step off the bus to Camp Legume, leaping into our faces and shouting, what?s the matter Gump, can?t you penetrate my sparkling patois? Preparing us for the bellestristic calisthenics to come. But it?s not really like a drill instructor spitting in our faces, it?s like watching a drill instructor from a cozy distance behind a sneeze shield. It?s not personal. He?s just having fun, like Mozart, seeing what he can get away with, literaturally. And so we go along, smiling like tourists. The book is more than a book about the 60s. The period is just a setting for a story about people who are trying to get along in an era of vast change, trying to come to terms with their history, their present, and the real-seeming promise of their future. At the same time, we know in retrospect that all the hope of that period was misplaced; the Age of Aquarias was just an unrealized dream. In the end, Woodstock devolved into a joke about brown acid, and the people who went there to be free eventually moved into the suburbs built over Max Yazgur's farm. And that's really what this book is about - the unrealized dream that was the sixties, the hope that died with Martin, Bobby and John. Its title says it all - We Are Billion Year Old Carbon. That 60s statement of the ultimate brotherhood of mankind, that we are all stardust, and when we look at ourselves from the moon, we live on a very small world and we are all made from the explosions of stars - it's time to get along, time to stop fighting and time to come to terms with the fact that we are just mites on a tiny blue marble floating in a vast impersonal universe. But despite that awakening realization, expressed in the song from which this book takes its title, in the end we (the characters in this book) ultimately succumb to the mundane mendacity of our all-too-Republican lives, and either become radicals who pointlessly blow ourselves up, or stock brokers who sell our ideals for a comfortable two-car gargage in which we wait for death. So yes, Corey Mesler defintely has something to add to the record of that era. It's last story hasn't been told, and it's hope is not entirely lost, as long as there is a hero still willing to do something completely pointless for no better reason than it's the right thing to do.
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