is there anything more unfulfilling than reading a dull book? after polishing off the August selection of my Book Club, i’ve decided that as a group we have the shittest taste in books ever. ever. we’ve read some shitty, shitty stuff, including Jonathan Lethem’s completely pointless Fortress of Solitude, the winner of the National Book Award (this book makes me totally doubt the national book award as the judge of any kind of goodness), The News from Paraguay, and the plodding Crabwalk by Gunther Grass. august’s pick is called Upstate. it’s a yawner, but at least it was a quick read. the entire story is told in letters. the problem is that the letters are written by a 16 and 17 year old. and not even particularly interesting teenagers, either. even though one of the characters is in prison for killing his dad. the entire book just read like something else i had read before. and that’s not good at all.

if i were you, i’d avoid this one and go out and immeditately by Michael Turner’s The Pornographer’s Poem, now that book, that booked kicked so many kinds of ass the mind boggles as such ass kickingness. the book is dark and distrubing and oddly erotic and really original. probably the best book i’ve read in months.

and though i bitch about the dullness of Upstate, i cannot deny that it kept my mind occupied and i didn’t think about work or my creative frustration once. not a single time. i only had to read and buy the new Sufjan Stevens record to get rid of it. and here i thought the only thing that was gonna shake me from the funk was getting drunk and laid.