NNNNN by Carl Reiner

Carl Reiner will always be Alan Brady to me, the man who made Robert Petrie’s life so difficult on the Dick Van Dyke Show.  The fact that Carl Reiner’s glory days were about fifty  years before he wrote NNNNN gives hope to all of us poor schmucks who still want to be novelists one of these days. NNNNN is possibly the worst title ever given to a book, though Carl seems to think it ranks up their with M.  To me it was too much like a Marx Brothers routine, you left out an N-and the most important one, too!…

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

I liked Mark Haddon’s debut novel about a 15 year old boy who discovers a neighbor’s dog dead-impaled with a garden fork.  He then sets about doing a bit of detecting in an effort to discover the identy of the killer.  Following in the footsteps of Flowers for Algernon we see the world through Christopher’s eyes-a world that is at times greatly different from the world most of us live in. Christopher over explains everything-when he introduces himself he explains the history of the name ‘Christopher’ and how he doesn’t really like what it means.  He is autistic, and the…

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