Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in podcast form

First off, thanks everyone for coming by last night! That book was like George Bush-- it united us in opposition and anger. It made for a fun book club.

I'm not sure that anyone will avail themselves of the opportunity, but just in case, podcasts of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the text of the book are available here. The guy has a pretty good voice.

Also, I was keeping it a secret until now, but my favorite books are Black Boy by Richard Wright and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu.

Wayne's Book Picks

A little strange, a big brother, and a slap in the face.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk (272 Pages)

New York Times Review
Chuck Palahniuk's impressively febrile imagination now yields Lullaby, the story of a sweet-sounding weapon of mass destruction. ...with this fourth novel Mr. Palahniuk further refines his ability to create parables that are as substantial as they are off-the-wall. Janet Maslin

Kirkus Reviews
The latest comic outrage from Palahniuk (Choke, 2001, etc.) concerns a lethal African poem, an unwitting serial killer, a haunted-house broker, and a frozen baby. In other words, the usual Palahniuk fare. Carl Streator is a grizzled City Desk reporter whose outlook on life has a lot to do with years of interviewing grief-stricken parents, spouses, children, victims, and survivors. His latest investigation is a series of crib deaths. A very good reporter, one thing he's got is an eye for detail, and he notices that there's always a copy of the same book (Poems and Rhymes Around the World) at the scene of these deaths. In fact, more often than not, the book is open to an African nursery rhyme called a "culling chant." A deadly lullaby? It sounds crazy, but Carl discovers that simply by thinking about someone while reciting the poem he can knock him off in no time at all. First, his editor dies. Then an annoying radio host named Dr. Sara. It's too much to be a coincidence: Carl needs help-and fast, before he kills off everyone he knows. He investigates the book and finds that it was published in a small edition now mainly held in public libraries, so he begins by tracking down everyone known to have checked the book out. This brings him to the office of Helen Hoover Boyle, a realtor who makes a good living selling haunted houses-and reselling them a few months later after the owners move out. A son of Helen's died of crib death about 20 years ago, and she's reluctant to talk to Carl until he gains the confidence of her Wiccan secretary, Mona Sabbat. Together, Carl, Helen, Mona, and Mona's ecoterrorist/scam-artist boyfriend Oyster set out across the country to find and destroy every one ofthe 200-plus remaining copies of Poems and Rhymes. But can Carl (and Helen) forget the chant themselves? Pandora never did manage to get her box shut, after all. Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you'd expect from Palahniuk.


Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (288 Pages)
Just a brief review as we all should have read this years ago. If you didn't just think "1984" only bettter.

Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come. theirs.

'Blood Meridian,' by Cormac McCarthy (327 Pages)

Review by CARYN JAMES NY Times
Published: April 28, 1985
"BLOOD MERIDIAN'' comes at the reader like a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West full of charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps, a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants. But while Cormac McCarthy's fifth novel is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore. Any page of his work reveals his originality, a passionate voice given equally to ugliness and lyricism. Over the past 20 years the brutality of his subjects may have kept readers away, but the power of his writing has earned high critical repute. Three early novels, in fact - ''The Orchard Keeper,'' ''Outer Dark'' and ''Child of God'' - have been reissued in the Ecco Press series, ''Neglected Works of the Twentieth Century.''
BLOOD MERIDIAN Or The Evening Redness in the West, By Cormac McCarthy. This latest book is his most important, for it puts in perspective the Faulknerian language and unprovoked violence running through the previous works, which were often viewed as exercises in style or studies of evil. ''Blood Meridian'' makes it clear that all along Mr. McCarthy has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality; his elaborate language invents a world hinged between the real and surreal, jolting us out of complacency.
Loosely based on historical events, the novel follows a fictitious 14-year-old called only ''the kid'' - born in 1833, exactly 100 years before the author - as he drifts through the Southwest. He soon joins an outlaw band of Indian hunters who have been hired by a Mexican governor to return Apache scalps at $100 apiece. These misfits - including an ex-priest, a man with initials tattooed on his forehead and a mysterious, erudite judge named Holden - have a taste for blood and death that Mr. McCarthy seems to revel in.
Grotesque descriptions are alleviated by scenes that might have come off a movie screen. Indians pass through the novel like extras in a Fellini film, ''wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery . . . one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a blood stained weddingveil.'' The kid's terseness is a mild parody of B-movie westerns. Looking at a severed head, ''he spat and wiped his mouth. He aint no kin to me, he said.'' The horrifying details stick in our minds, however, while the surreal elements melt away. That imbalance is a problem, for Mr. McCarthy's emphasis is not on the violent set pieces but on the characters' reactions to them. The kid recedes into the background as the judge comes forward, in scene after scene sounding the novel's major themes and hinting at the author's strategy. Half-naked, the judge sits among the others by the fire ''like an icon'' and pontificates. One who observed a conflict between two enemies ''expressed the very nature of the witness and . . . was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?'' Pointing to the surrounding Indian ruins he announces, ''Here are the dead fathers'' against whom their descendants define themselves.
The kid and the judge are our own dead fathers, whom Mr. McCarthy resurrects for us to witness. He distances us not only from the historical past, not only from our cowboy-and-Indian images of it, but also from revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims. All men are unremittingly bloodthirsty here, poised at a peak of violence, the ''meridian'' from which their civilization will quickly fall. War is a civilized ritual beyond morality for the judge, but not for Mr. McCarthy, who positions his readers to evaluate the characters' moral and philosophical stances. The kid frequently responds to the judge's grandiose speeches by saying, ''You're crazy'' - a notion so plausible that it effectively undermines the judge's authority.
Mr. McCarthy carefully builds this dialectic only to let us down with a stylistically dazzling but facile conclusion. Years later, in a saloon where a bear dances on stage, the kid encounters the judge, who calls himself a ''true dancer'' of history, one who recognizes ''the sanctity of blood.'' There is a hint that he kills the kid. Last seen as a towering figure on stage, the judge is ''naked, dancing . . . He says that he will never die.'' H E is denied the last word, though. Mr. McCarthy's half-page epilogue presents a man crossing the plain making holes in the ground, blindly followed by other men who search for meaning in this pattern of holes. The judge's enigmatic dance and the long ordeal of the novel's violence demand more than this easy ambiguity. There are, of course, no answers to the life-and-death issues Mr. McCarthy raises, but there are more rigorous, coherent ways to frame the questions.