Bookstorm

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is one book that's going to stay with me for the rest of my life. It's the most violent book I've ever read, and some of its images--especially one of an Indian wearing women's clothes during a massacre--aren't easily forgotten. Now a bunch of artists (including Zak Smith, author of We Did Porn, a book I heartily recommend) are getting together to illustrate McCarthy's masterpiece: "... great handfuls of viscera, genitals ... and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows." Looks like they've gotten it right.

The Los Angeles Times profiles Michael Connelly, who's one of my guilty-pleasure authors.

I've been reading Connelly's The Poet, which is one of the scariest serial-killer novels I've ever read. And I don't mean horror-movie scary, although there's plenty of gore and a few weird kills. (In one memorable instance, a young college student is found chopped in half.) There's nothing cheap about The Poet. It's gotten under my skin in ways I didn't expect. Even in his scant appearances, the Poet has more depth than the average serial killers you find in crime fiction. He's very creepy. Connelly drops clues and plays the plot--which is airtight--like a violin, but there's nothing manipulative about the book. It's pretty simple: Connelly's haunting procedural is scary because he's a great writer and a great storyteller.

It's summer and I'm almost done reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment--soon to be a video game!--and I'm puttering around my apartment, reorganizing my bookcases and making a rough list of summer titles to read. Among the worthy candidates:

• Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.
• Paula by Isabel Allende.
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.
• The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.
• Bonk by Mary Roach.
• Light in August by William Faulkner.

Of course, this list isn't set in stone, but it looks pretty good to me.