Waugh's other stuff is still pretty solid. Brideshead Revisited isn't as consistently funny (though the Oxford scenes can get pretty entertaining), but it probably has more thematic weight to it. Same goes for A Handful of Dust, which is probably his best novel from a literary perspective. Plus, it has a hilarious…

I think the goal was to do "new classics" or something to that effect, so I don't expect to see anything that's already in the canon. Though if we do veer into older material, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is absolutely hilarious. I've read a number of his novels and it's the one I've enjoyed the most.

Devil in the White City is good, but I would recommend something like Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line. It is an absolutely hilarious novel from the late 60s about a guy taking the train from Moscow to a distant suburb to see his girlfriend and child, but he just drinks the entire time and has crazy…

@Evel - I had the same experience with an older novel recently, where it said that one of the characters "ejaculated" out a sentence.

Yeah, we need at least a few eps with the mother so that we can see the chemistry between them and be like, yeah, this girl is so much better for Ted than Stella or Victoria or Robin. If it just ended with someone coming up to Ted and asking him a question after class, there wouldn't be the same feeling that it had…

A spindle? That's the cheapest packaging for a commercial release I've ever heard of. Damn.

I more or less agree - I'm not going to say his movies are the best ever made or anything, but several of them are pretty funny, even if ultimately flawed. I think his main problem is that he's a much better writer than he is a director, but he always wants to direct his own stuff. If he had farmed out his directing…

@ diablevert13 - I think regressive was the wrong word. I was thinking about comments in another one of these threads about how after blowing our minds with all of this freaky shit, Dunn ultimately adopts a traditional mindset that these people have to be punished. I think I made my point poorly.

Yeah, I'm not saying I want some totally PC thing where all the freaks are great people and the norms are the ones causing the problems. That would be boring and quite predictable. I'm just saying the presentation of the freaks conforms with other reactionary aspects of the novel.

Lick wants to remove whatever it is that makes women sexually attractive from them. In the case of norms, that's removing the breasts, scarring their faces, or making them fat. In the case of someone like Miranda who uses her "gift" to attract men, it's removing that gift - whether it be a tail, long pubic hair,…

"Here twisted exteriors house even more twisted psyches."
You know, I think that's one of the things about the book that bothers me. Others have commented earlier that the novel is in a lot of ways regressive - that ultimately the bad guys get their comeuppance, etc. I would extend that to say that, unlike Burton et…

Good catch. I didn't notice it until you pointed it out, but now I think it would bother me if I were rereading it. Mostly, I just want to know why there's not carny lingo - Did Dunn interview people and learn that there isn't really a secret carnival dialect? Did she decide not to use it to make an already…

I also read Fight Club after seeing the movie (probably have the same copy as you - as much as I hate movie tie-in covers, it was the only copy I could find). I made an attempt at Invisible Monsters, but I think I only made it about 20 pages in. I just didn't connect to it. It's still sitting on my bookshelf. One…

In defense of the Cajuns, their accent is based on 17th century French by way of Nova Scotia, translated into English.

Yeah, if he was invisible, the mallet should have still hit him. Maybe he also turned incorporeal.

What I enjoyed most about the Wrenchy/hammer fight was that it literally started in the background while Sam and Ben were talking about something else. You see Sock wandering around as Wrenchy, then the hammer just comes in from off screen and it's on. But Sam and Ben don't notice immediately. Awesome.

Yeah, I'm with Tasha on this one - I just don't buy that she would still love Arty after everything he did to the family, even if it was just a desire to love him rather than the real thing. Maybe she could ignore how much of an asshole he was for a while, but not after the lobotomy…

Though, obviously, only works when the author is still alive/not a recluse/whatever. In those cases, I would say maybe do an interview with someone who has studied the author/book. Even most relatively new books have some scholar somewhere who has written an article about it (plus, I would assume most of the cases…

Maybe it's well recommended among the circus freak circuit. Which happens to overlap with the AV Club readership. ;)

Yeah, no one ever questioned whether the cats would get a taste for human flesh…