Sunday Recommendations

My last few posts on The Hangover have seen my readership soar into the double digits; the last one in particular inspired an influx of page-views. I am enlightened enough to know, however, that putting "pedophilia", "pederasty" and "she-male" into any single post will guarantee more page-views than usual.

I promise I will never judge my readership, but may I just say? If you were disappointed for non-intellectual reasons when you came across my postings on The Hangovers, I suspect this is not the blog for you and you are not going to meet the kind of people you're looking for in the comments section. If you were disappointed intellectually, then by all means read on: I promise you much, much more of the same.

For today's Sunday Recommendation, I'm just going to recommend a book I really enjoyed. An alert reader bought it for me, I still don't really know why, except I read it and have enjoyed it thoroughly. It's about Tintin. And Barthes and Baudelaire and Derrida and Professor Calculus and Captain Haddock. It's called Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy. The thing is, it's really enjoyable. It's like reading chocolate cake.

Now, I do worry. I suspect that if I were to investigate Tom McCarthy further, I'd discover that the chef of this cake is someone I might not like; it might be like eating a delicious chocolate cake and then discovering that it was cooked by a New York State Senator who voted against gay marriage. Of course, the opposite is also possibly true: it might be like eating chocolate cake and discovering it was cooked by . . . hmm, the New York State Senators who voted for gay marriage are for the most part cynically corrupt, foul-breathed creatures whose palms smell like sweat and coins, they just happened to get this one right. But you know what I'm saying. I might discover a novelist whose works I would treasure. Perhaps there are people shaking their head as they read this right now, the same sort of people who shook their heads because I didn't watch Flight of the Conchords; I can remedy that (I did with FotC).

By the way, Eminem has always been an interesting artist because he begins most tracks as though he's at the end of his tether, frothing, with the veins in his neck about to burst with pulses of rage, and from there he only gets angrier. But I think Nicki Minaj kicks his ass here and makes him sound a bit . . . silly?