Dan Brooks Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Dan Brooks

Two book titles that describe how the books function in the real world are "Infinite Jest" and "Confederacy of Dunces."

Dan Brooks

In this satire of American race relations, Beatty makes comedy out of one of the most serious topics imaginable... The book’s lesson is not easily distilled, and Beatty relentlessly complicates it in ways that evoke the old maxim: It’s funny because it’s true.

Dan Brooks

Since the vaudeville era... the publishing industry seems to prefer that writers of color present themselves as the subjects of grim generational trauma. Everett goes straight at this limiting convention with a bitterness so evident that the reader cannot help but laugh.

Dan Brooks

@BlocBoy_JV You’re missing out! But like, many movies, particularly comedies: Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Big Lebowski. And for that matter, what is the message/lesson of Macbeth or The Sun Also Rises or Cathedral by Raymond Carver?

Dan Brooks

This 1938 novel combines old-fashioned dramatic irony with the conventions of farce to produce a high-water mark in Wodehouse’s Jeeves series.

Dan Brooks

@sarahburnes It’s an old one, but Mating by Norman Rush is the best book I’ve read this year.

Dan Brooks

This novel by my favorite living essayist starts with a tragedy and ends somewhere more ambivalent... Oyler makes it funny by allowing her fictional stand-in to look petty, vain, and selfish -like a real person.

Dan Brooks

@collnsmith One of the interesting/unfalsifiable arguments in Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan is that selfish or aggressive people in hunter-gatherer bands were likely to be nudged off a cliff, and selfish behavior only started conferring a competitive advantage after agriculture.

Dan Brooks

I am sad to hear of the passing of P.J. O'Rourke. My parents had a copy of Republican Party Reptile when I was a kid, and that led me to read everything else. He was funny and interesting in a way that transcended politics, and any writer should admire his work.

Out of stock

Dan Brooks

A HA (David Foster Wallace, interviewed by David Lipsky in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself) https://t.co/Xr2DMghq6t