June 2010
11 posts
1 tag
“An angel from heaven, that old lady, but I can’t feel a thing except pain...”
– Vernon God Little
MAY’S BOOK
VERNON GOD LITTLE
by DBC Pierre
These days no one really buys into the cartoonish stereotype of the American grain belt as a laid-back, friendly cowpoke’s paradise. And yet what people suppose to be the “dark side” of Texas - church-burnings, Ewingesque oil tycoons - is equally silly and theatrical. The true darkness in the Lone Star state is found at the edge of the...
May 2010
1 post
April 2010
19 posts
1 tag
1 tag
“THE QUESTION IS… HOW DARK CAN IT GET WHILST STILL BEING FUNNY?”
–
1 tag
Jemima: It's likely there is an underlying torture - too much is left unsaid.
Danny: The Bell Jar is a series of disappointments, chapter to chapter it stutters through. It is heavy with bleak realness, inverting normal rites of passage.
Liz: The stagnancy she talks of is frightening - nothing is new, nothing is refreshed.
“Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I...”
– The Bell Jar
APRIL'S BOOK
THE BELL JAR
by Sylvia Plath
From the Publisher
This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained...
AT THE DRIVE-IN - One Armed Scissor
Dissect a...
March 2010
24 posts
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
Never Let Me Go - "a uniquely moving novel".
Apparently people have cried after reading this book.
Fortunately, we at Pump are made of stronger stuff. The majority of us found the main characters annoying and were quite perturbed by Ruth and Tommy’s passive acceptance of their fate. The more we discussed the book, the more it became quite apparent that the book was a) not at all moving, and b) massively overrated.
Evie: How do you make a budget film? Only use one actor.
James: I don't understand, where was Kevin Spacey?
MARCH'S BOOK
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
“A clear frontrunner to be the year’s most extraordinary novel, Never Let Me Go is the third book in what could be called Kazuo Ishiguro’s Bewilderment Trilogy. Like its predecessors, The Unconsoled (1995) and When We Were Orphans (2000), it is riddled with mystery. As Kathy, a 31-year-old carer living in England in the late 1990s, looks back...
Arcade Fire - No Cars Go
