Been doing a little reading here and there lately:
The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard. When a cadet is found murdered and mutilated at West Point in the mid 19th Century, the commandant contacts Augustus Landor, a former New York City detective who has retired to the countryside. As Landor begins to dig into the death, he decides he needs a youthful assistant from within the cadet corps, and recruits to his cause a young Edgar Allan Poe. The story cleverly unfolds through letters and journal entries by both Landor and Poe, and rather unsurprisingly, the story takes a markedly Poevian turn before it reaches its climax. Bayard established a clever grasp of Victorian literature with his first book,
Mr. Timothy, a detective novel starring Tiny Tim of Dickens’
A Christmas Carol. But
The Pale Blue Eye feels more fully-realized, and I enjoyed the Poe allusions throughout.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole. I pulled this one off my bookshelf one night when I was in the mood for a comedy. It’s been 5 years or so since I last read it, and I had forgotten how wonderfully absurd this novel is. Toole created an amazing cast of misfits, then threw them into the chaotic cauldron of mid-century New Orleans, and the result is a rollicking farce that continually makes me laugh out loud. Every time I read the dialogue of the story’s main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, I always hear it in my head in the voice of
Comic Book Guy, probably my favorite of all the secondary Simpsons characters. And I can’t help but think that in some way, The Simpsons writers owe a small debt to Toole’s writing. It’s a shame that Toole took his own life before writing another book. He truly was an amazing talent who was ahead of his time.
The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard. When a cadet is found murdered and mutilated at West Point in the mid 19th Century, the commandant contacts Augustus Landor, a former New York City detective who has retired to the countryside. As Landor begins to dig into the death, he decides he needs a youthful assistant from within the cadet corps, and recruits to his cause a young Edgar Allan Poe. The story cleverly unfolds through letters and journal entries by both Landor and Poe, and rather unsurprisingly, the story takes a markedly Poevian turn before it reaches its climax. Bayard established a clever grasp of Victorian literature with his first book, Mr. Timothy, a detective novel starring Tiny Tim of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But The Pale Blue Eye feels more fully-realized, and I enjoyed the Poe allusions throughout.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole. I pulled this one off my bookshelf one night when I was in the mood for a comedy. It’s been 5 years or so since I last read it, and I had forgotten how wonderfully absurd this novel is. Toole created an amazing cast of misfits, then threw them into the chaotic cauldron of mid-century New Orleans, and the result is a rollicking farce that continually makes me laugh out loud. Every time I read the dialogue of the story’s main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, I always hear it in my head in the voice of Comic Book Guy, probably my favorite of all the secondary Simpsons characters. And I can’t help but think that in some way, The Simpsons writers owe a small debt to Toole’s writing. It’s a shame that Toole took his own life before writing another book. He truly was an amazing talent who was ahead of his time.
2 comments:
I might have to check out the Confederacy of Dunces.
Definitely worth the read. It's hilarious.
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