This an excellent collection of creepy and mysterious short stories. If you’ve read Chaon before, you’ll know what to expect: gloomy midwesterners, suggestions of ghosts and painful pasts, an obsession with twins and changing identities, all written in his simple but vivid style. Highly recommended! The first story, “The Bees,” is the most creepy, disturbing, and nightmarish; read it first or last depending on whether that appeals to you or not.

Another I particularly liked is “To Psychic Underworld:,” about a widowed father who keeps finding (and collecting) little notes and lists and scraps of paper he finds, a habit I have, as well. He describes the appeal, mystery, and sadness of finding such things well:

Now, suddenly, it seemed that there were notes everywhere, emerging out of the blur of the world. Something had happened to him not that Beth was gone, he thought—there was an opening, a space, a part of his brain that had been deaf before was now exposed, it was as if he were a long-dormant radio that had begun to receive signals—tuned in, abruptly, to all the crazy note-writers of the world.

“Please,” someone had written on a napkin and left it on the table in McDonald’s, where he had taken Hazel for a little peaceful snack, a casual Toledo afternoon, but now here was this other voice poking its head through the surface of his consciousness like a worm peeking up out of the ground. “Please,” in ballpoint pen on the napkin. And then “Please” on the napkin underneath it, and “Please” again on a third. Someone was either very polite or very desperate.

Why do people think blogs are dead (or dying)? As more and more sites are bought by the same big companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), it’s easy to imagine that many people will want to go back to a format in which they can create their own networks, without targeted ads or annoying algorithms, that won’t be feeding quite so directly into those big companies marketing data operations. Isn’t it?

I’ve been reading a lot of comments on Twitter and elsewhere around the Internet lately saying that blogs are dead or that you should kill your blog, and it’s inspired me to start posting here again.

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
• Right Ho, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse
• Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor (I’ve also reread most of her short stories.)
• A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
• The Stranger, Albert Camus
• The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• My Life and Hard Times, James Thurber
• David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
• 1984, George Orwell
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

Not sure what Mauriac would make of me. Lots of fantasy, because I was an obsessive fantasy reader when I was in junior high school, and then I reread some of those books as an adult to see if I could remember why I was so obsessed with them. Rereading a book you first read when you were younger reminds me of the saying about egg nog: when you drink it as a child it makes you feel like an adult, and when you drink it as an adult it makes you feel like a child again.

You never really read the same book twice, because you change between every reading.

(It’s good, by the way. Not sure why I waited so long to read it.)

Bukowski Man, sort of like our anthropological forebears Peking Man or Piltdown Man, almost a special subspecies of human. You’ve probably run into Bukowski Man in one form or another. He’s like, you know, a rebel, he’s not into conventional literature, man. Because it doesn’t tell the truth. The man can’t handle The Truth, which of course is all about (and only about) getting drunk and pissing and shitting and puking and fucking and passing out, not necessarily in that order, sometimes virtually simultaneously. What else do we know about Bukowski Man? He’s probably a suburban white boy who’s never been more down and out than a collect call to his parents. Usually there’s a surfboard or a skateboard or a Frisbee involved. His dog wears a red bandanna around its neck. Oh, and yes, he’s likely to be a shoplifter.

Anyway, I find the topic of most stolen books (and cars and records and other things) fascinating, and wish papers would run a “most stolen” list next to the bestsellers.

I thought of the article last night when I happened to see a “teaser” on the local news for a story about the recent attempted airplane bombing. The newscaster said something along the lines of “In the wake of the recent attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines 253, Americans are increasingly worried about airport security.” It was a good reminder to always be on the lookout for weaselly abstractions in writing or speaking. “Americans,” “everybody,” “more and more people,” “sources,” and my personal favorite, usually used by politicans, “folks,” are all signals that a tendentious argument (or simple hogwash) disguised as an assertion of fact is being proffered.

Television news teasers are meant to be vague and unspecific, of course, because they’re supposed to entice you into sitting through the commercials to find out what they’re actually talking about. But it’s good to keep in mind some of the best advice I’ve ever come across, political, aesthetic, or otherwise, concerning language. From Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style:

16. Use definite, specific, concrete language. Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

It’s hard advice to live up to consistently, but our media could certainly be doing a better job of it.

I will begin the new year, though, by wishing all readers my best wishes for the year to come, and offer my endorsement for this proposal from the National Association of Good Grammar (NAGG) to say “twenty ten” instead of “two thousand and ten.”

Happy new year, everyone!