welllll.....

a life-changer for me, and this is a bit embarassing perhaps, but ... Shirley's Out On A Limb. okay, so i was 18 at the time, just moved away from home, etc...but the idea that there might be more to life than trying to get a.) beer and b.) laid, well, that was kinda revolutionary for the young Bradley. 

looking back two decades later, i find that my pre-O.O.A.L. philosophies were in fact accurate, but i thought i'd give ol' Shirl some credit for that epiphony-laden period that sent me off on a decade of staring into candles and buying too many fucking crystals. sigh. thank almighty God i've come to my senses and now spend all my time plundering the environment so as to accumulate wealth while i await the Rapture.

anyway...

a couple others that have impacted the lobes frontal, dorsal and elsewhere:

Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles......totally tripped me out in high school. reread it a few months back, and it holds up perfectly. The Illustrated Man was great...shit, his Playboy interview, too. what can i say, the man's a genius in his field, and maybe a few others, too. ah, space exploration...

loved John McPhee's Encounters With the Arch-druid. mentioned this one a few weeks ago. not quite as entertaining as Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, but definitely not as Earth First-y either. Encounters is..fair and balanced, you might say. a classic.

been on a Vonnegut tear lately...finally. man, was i late to that party...duh. started with Cat's Cradle (woo-hoo! fantastic.), then went to Hocus Pocus and Slaughterhouse Five. Galapagos is on deck. amazing to actually read his stuff and see how far he's seeped into the culture without my having realized it.

others on the recent reading list:

just reread The Stand last month, KDB. quite an epic. quite. a bit imposing at 817 pages of small print, but after a while you don't want it to end.

also just went through The Best Of Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, sure, but that was the kids' stuff; his Best Of is very adult, and very...dark, actually...but [unlike King] not so graphic. who knew he was so twisted??)

Wicked - the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory McGuire. really interesting fictional spinoff, very imaginative.

and a bunch of others, but that would be just showing off at this point. next.