Top 40 Stevie Nicks Songs

1) Rhiannon: Dreams unwind
Love's a state of mind2) Silver Springs: I'll say I loved you years ago, tell myself you never loved me, no
3)Dreams: Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me
Who wants to wrap around your dreams and...
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?4) Gypsy: And it all comes down to you, well you know that it does. Well lightning strikes maybe once, maybe twice
5) Landslide: I've been afraid of changing, cuz I built my life around you
6) Gold Dust Woman: Rulers make bad lovers
You better put your kingdom up for sale7) The Chain: the chain will keep us together
8) Sisters of the Moon: So we make our choices
When there is no choice
And we listen to their voices
Ignoring our own voice9) Sara: All I ever wanted
Was to know that you were dreaming10) Seven Wonders: So it's hard to find
Someone with that kind of intensity11) I Don't Want to Know: I don't wanna stand between you and love honey I just want you to feel fine
12) Edge of Seventeen: And the music there it was hauntingly...
familiar
And I see you doing...
what I try to do for me13) Stand Back: No one looked...as I walked by
Just an invitation would have been just fine14) Rooms on Fire: well there is magic all around you, if i do say so myself. I have known this much longer than I've known you
15) Ghosts: one day they were lovers, one day they were friends, there was nothing left to say
16) Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?
17) Love Changes: it wasn't that I didn't love you, i just couldn't make you see, that as hard as i tried to make it all better, it was not better for me
18) Unconditional Love: the one condition of love is that there are none at all
19) That Made Me Stronger: can you write this for me, he says no you write your songs yourself
20) Every Day: Don't keep me hangin' on a string 
Tell me what I feel is no big thing

My Ideal Bookshelf

The Hours-- Michael Cunningham
Cold Spring Harbor-- Richard Yates
The Informers--Bret Easton Ellis
I am Charlotte Simmons--Tom Wolfe
Play It As It Lays--Joan Didion
White Noise--Don Delillo
To the Lighthouse--Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway--Virginia Woolf
Vineland-- Thomas Pynchon
The Year of Magical Thinking--Joan Didion
The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
Bright Lights, Big City Jay McInerney
Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon
Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
Looking for Alaska John Green
Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut
Portrait of the Artist James Joyce
Dubliners James Joyce
J Alfred Prufrock T.S. Eliot
The Sportswriter Richard Ford
The Awakening Kate Chopin

#53: Election-- Tom Perotta

Shows a few glimpses of the author he later becomes, but hardly as satisfying as The Leftovers. Too conventional; perhaps my negative reaction is just to the fact that it's so dated. I would have liked to see less of a tight focus on the election itself. Rarely do I say this, but the book was too short.

A Definition of What this Blog is All About

instant wealth 
emotionally disengaged sex
information overload 
belief in the ability of ingested substances to alter the aura of one’s flesh or personality architecture 
neglect of the maintenance of democracy

willful ignorance of history 
body manipulation 
willful rejection of reflection 
body envy 
belief that spectacle is reality 
vicarious living through celebrities
rejection of sentiment 
unwillingness to assign hierarchy to values

--From Douglas Coupland's "Brentwood Notebook" (Polaroids from the Dead) 

#52 Model Behavior Jay McInerney

Jacket Copy: Jay McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, helped bring about a revolution in contemporary fiction in trade paperback. But more importantly, its publication brought us a major writer of great literary talent and incisive perception. 
In his latest novel, Model Behavior, McInerney offers us the portrait of a doubting devotee of the city where vocation, career, and ambition (which only occassionally coincide) run head-on with friendship and love--or merely desire. We see Conor McKnight's well-earned ennui fast becoming anxiety as he tries to protect himself from the harrowing fate that unfolds before his bleary eyes. McInerney is at the peak of his craft in what is sure to become a classic at the end of the century. 

Similar to: McInerney's Bright Lights Big City, Delillo's Falling Man, Bret Easton Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms


Highlights:
I enjoyed having  a version of Bright Lights Big City that was more updated for the new millenium. As usual with this type of book, my favorite part was the pop culture references, and the disillusionment and ennui of people living superficial lives. The thing I like about McInerney is that he manages to tell just as real and raw of a story as Bret Easton Ellis, but without the gore and disturbing scenes that haunt you (in a bad way, not in a Joan Didion-esque way). He's able to do something that few people can do--tell a relatively clean, PG-13 story that still manages to pack a punch. 

#51 The Gum Thief Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—think Clerks meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is the story of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Roger and Bethany, two very different, but strangely connected, “aisles associates” at Staples. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger’s opus is a Cheever-style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger’s unsettled—and unsettling—life.

Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death, and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them…and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.

Similar to: The Office (U.S. television show. maybe the British one too...haven't seen it); Joshua Ferris' "And Then We Came to the End" 

The Part Where I Write A Paragraph (or a few) which may or may not be about the actual book i'm supposedly reviewing and will most likely end up revealing more about me than it will about said book:

Wow that was incredibly post-modern of me. The first time I actually write anything that lives up to my blog URL-name. Yay me! So as you can probably tell from where this entry has gone so far, I'm changing the nature of this blog a bit. I got bored with it. I want a new format that lets me write more... cuz when i try to write a review and limit myself to talking about one specific piece of writing, I end up hitting a dead end pretty quickly. And that's no fun. And very self-defeating. I like to write. So i'mma write a blog in a format that actually lets me write more than 2 sentences. Yay me squared! So yeah I'll talk about that book, but then I'll digress to other things that occurred to me/were brought to my attention over the course of the day. Then maybe I'll circle back around to the book and try and tie it all together. That will be a fun (and uber impressive) feat of bull-shitting. 

So... the book. After reading several mediocre---and some just plain crap---books by Doug Coupland, this was a pleasant surprise. In fact, after Generation X, its my favorite thing he's written. We'll see if that changes after I read Player One, Dysfunctional Family, Girlfriend in a Coma, and the one about the beauty pageant queen. But rather than telling you why its great, I want you to find out for yourself by actually reading it. 

The one thing I will say about it is that the way it has the guy writing his own novel within the novel (and we get to read both of these novels) would be cliched by most other authors, but Coupland does this narrative device justice. Which brings me to random conversation of the day that I had #1: Don Quixote. But actually, no I'm tired. I'll just leave it at that a comparison can be made between the two books in their "meta" nature. 

#50 The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes

Jacket Copy: By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.
 
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. 
 
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.

Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, Philip Roth

My Thoughts: This book had a much more pessimistic view on life than I (and i think most of us) like to consider... and I think that was the point. He wants to shake us out of our complacency and make us question what we're doing, instead of just blindly going along until one day we realize we can't really take responsibility for our own life--either credit or blame--because of how few choices we have really made, how few things we have actively made happen rather than just passively allow to happen to us. I think to an extent this way of thinking can be beneficial, but to dwell on it too much will only lead to being trapped in the past and a paralysis on further action. That's why the short length of this book--in addition to being ideal for those of us readers with rather short attention spans--suits the book's purpose very well. It was good to think about the questions Barnes raises, within the context of this story, and then go on with my life and leave that 2 hours of reading the book where i was deeply anxious but also stirring myself to productivity, behind me.