Perhaps not as glistening as their most recent release Sun Gangs, Nux Vomica by the upstart band The Veils is worthy of mention.  Though it’s perhaps less polished than Sun Gangs, the songs contained within possess more raw power, energy and even consistency than their newer offering.

Skipper of the group Finn Andrews possesses a voice that trembles, wails and screams with a feverish emotion that at times channels the likes of Nick Cave, The Cure’s Robert Smith, and even Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin.  Though it is more than his voice which carries the record, as his skilled accompaniment makes a bit more accessible what would amount to an otherwise be a fatiguing listening experience. Like Modest Mouse, The Veils have rotated members routinely, though it doesn’t show as this group, like MM, play so tightly together that from album to album they make it work effortlessly, surprisingly so since much of the songs are up tempo.

Nux Vomica is a fairly dark album.  Songs like Jesus for The Jugular, Not Yet, Nux Vomica, A Birthday Present, and  bonus track Night Thoughts of a Tired Surgeon exude a barely contained, simmering rage from Andrews, singing of frenzy and powerlessness.  Though deflated by slower paced and introspective songs like Under the Folding Branches, this album is a jarring work that demands attention and further listening.

Gideon Defoe’s Pirate! adventure series could quite possibly be one of the most cleverly conceived treatises on existentialism yet conceived.  Sure, each installment is anachronistic, brief, side-splittingly funny, or what the erudites term “humorous”, and given the fact that the whole series not-so-subtly gains its impetus from Defoe’s unrequited love, is besides the point.   Doesn’t existentialism entail all of the above anyway?

In any case, take Defoe’s latest exposition, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Napoleon, whereby our faithful and true Pirate Captain takes a brief respite to ponder his place in the pirate world, and whether perhaps beekeeping or even the unparalleled  superciliousness of an exiled Napoleon can provide some meaning or contentment in this lifetime. For it is here that our fearless captain comes to a realization all Pirate Captains must eventually consider:

The Pirate Captain sighed. ‘Well then, I suppose we’d better go and see what’s more interesting than me.’

Beyond the philosophical reverberations of the work, we have the usual salty complement to offset the dueling shenanigans of the Pirate Captain and Napoleon; specifically, the pirate with a scarf, the pirate in green, and Jennifer the Victorian all lend a supporting hand.  As this is a work of action and adventure, while reading of luxurious beards, ham and the highly democratic war over the St. Helena Residents’ association, take heed and consider your place in the pirate world.

Web 2.0 in its highest form.  Egads.

Just finished At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft.  Fascinating, no dialogue whatsoever.  A good book to cleanse one’s reading palate, though I admire Lovecraft’s gift for vivid description.

In Modern Ranch Living, Mark Jude Poirier spends a great deal of time detailing the eccentricities of life in Tucson. It’s an entertaining read, as bright and sweeping as the Arizona sun’s perpetual blanket upon the desert. How quaint are the characters within, specifically a sixteen year old exercise-obsessed and grammatically challenged Kendra Lumm, along with her awkwardly inanimate neighbor Merv, Splash World employee extraordinaire who lives with mother…at the age of thirty. How amusing it is to behold Kendra’s incessant indignation toward the unfit and uneducated in the ways of proper weightlifting and dietary habits as well as Merv’s altruism in adjusting the catheters of certain Splash World patrons who need that extra bit of customer support.

One can undoubtedly progress through Modern Ranch Living without much of a care as to the result of the novel’s plot. Roughly, it concerns the whereabouts of a missing neighbor shared by Kendra and Merv; really though, it’s about how the characters find a release from the stagnation of the Arizona summer, as well as their own lives. As carefree as the atmosphere is, Poirier foreshadows almost too well, for towards the very end of the novel he destroys the whimsical and eccentric nature of the desert dwellers with a gut-check of uneasiness lingering well after the novel concludes. Modern Ranch Living deals with overcoming the disturbing behavior that while born out of weirdness and eccentricity, is nevertheless disturbing.

Wishing LibraryThing had one.

Here’s the word from the man (message 23):

So, there’s some back story here.

According to Amazon, iPhone applications that use Amazon data are forbidden by their terms of service. They have told us we can’t develop one. Meanwhile, a number of other companies have developed them, and… Amazon has done nothing about it.

You can imagine how I feel about all this, particularly as Amazon is, through Abebooks, a minority investor of LibraryThing. It’s no fun to have your minority owner directly competing with you, through Shelfari, and stopping you from doing what even even companies they don’t own are doing. I hope they either enforce their rules and cut off the iPhone apps., or allow us to build one.

We will be debuting an Amazon app soon, but it will not be a cataloging app. For that, we need to develop an iPhone-optimized web version

Channeling the gravitas of Borges and Calvino, Jeffrey Ford’s collection of short stories titled The Drowned Life, though at times overreaching in scope, sublimely conjures a sense of sheer wonder and befuddlement when confronted with the intersection of everyday life and the dreams that shape it, or are shaped by it.

Ford alternates his stories between the subtle and grandiose, the mundane and the outlandish, incorporating through each a pervasive sense of mystery and weirdness. When he is not detailing the wisdom of a soothsaying octopus, a town’s dependence upon an annual, magical breeze, and the peculiar behavior surrounding the annual “deathberry” drinkers, he describes the power contained within an overlooked scribble, an apartment’s potentially haunting flicker of light, losing a Chinese curse in a poker game, and the dictated writings of a comatose daughter through her mother.

This see-saw between the highly fantastical and the merely strange begs careful attention and even patience of the reader, noting the eternal truth that things are never what they seem. Several stories, especially that which introduces the fascinating Madame Mutandis, are deserving of their own novels. The Drowned Life is a deep and resonating read.

Also worth mentioning is an extended supplement in which Ford describes his biography and approach to writing, both of which explain much and lend credence to the saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

Imagine yourself involuntarily surrounded by a small group of travelers, forced by circumstance to cut off all interaction with society. Rumors tell of cities overflowing with corpses, and no one knows the cause nor the symptoms until it’s too late. A grand pestilence has infected the ports, and the only safe direction is inland and ever north. Such is the historically fictitious medieval mystery Company of Liars by Karen Maitland.

Maitland takes her fascination of the medieval period and constructs a very convincing and entertaining story around the occurrence of the Black Plague. While citizens are dropping like flies from port to port and across the countryside, Maitland’s company of nine is forced to interact and eventually divulge their secrets, stories and lies in a wayward attempt at survival, claiming each one by one. The pestilence serves not only as the driving force behind the story, but also the invisible element highlighting just how “interesting” the times were to live in during that period. Ironically, her interpretation of Medieval England is surprisingly similar, though a bit more lively (especially in dialogue), to other apocalyptic voices such as McCarthy’s The Road. Maitland skillfully illuminates a culture of indulgences, a preponderance of predestination, Jewish scapegoating, hypocrisy and the human pathos of a medieval mindset which is not so historically distant from ours.

Vivid description is Maitland’s major strength throughout the story. Not only does she deliver a magical element to the company’s progression, she also knows how to tell a story within a story. Each character’s secrets are deftly divulged as the story flows, until the final pages whereupon the reader won’t reach an unexpected twist as much as a cathartic resolution. The story of the camelot is an impressive and engaging read.

One cool relatively new aspect to LibraryThing is its ability not only to to get authors to sign up for their own profile on the site, but to participate in extended chats about their works as well as books and stuff in general.

I’m a fan of Hannah Tinti after reading her work Animal Crackers.  She’s taking questions on LT till the 4th.

Faces in the Fire is a quick and intriguing read in which T.L. Hines very deftly conveys his sense of “noire bizarre” around a curious set of characters, bottom-feeders he stresses, in a nonlinear progression. The characters, a truck driver, an email spammer, tattoo artist and hit man are equally as disparate as the circumstances around which they they cross paths; phantom catfish, haunted shoes, mystical tattoo ink, and a mysterious phone number all contribute to the progression of each character’s interconnected lives.

Hines doesn’t quite offer enough noire to the level out the bizarre. True, it’s a dark and suspenseful enough story but the characters, possessing a sense of anxious desperation, come off as more emotionally exhausted than perhaps darkly humorous or energized. Particularly memorable, though, is Hines’ characterization of Corrine the spammer; he delicately describes a profession and person not normally considered worthy of anything but detest. Hines uses an interesting metaphor of representing the characters’ movement as that of sharks, creatures that can never move backward, but rather only forward in pursuit of their catharsis from years of missed opportunity.

Faces in the Fire is a mysterious and entertaining work which makes the reader think long after the read is finished. Which is, I think, the sign of a well-crafted book.