Fun Home is fantastic.  I haven't read a lot of graphic novels, but it's got to be just about the only one of note to be more densely literary than Sandman.  Fragile Things is pretty great too, but yeah, there's a few execrable stories in there.  The gargoyle story was pretty dull in particular, and Gaiman is an…

Gone Girl was really fun.  And yeah, it's not quite as good after Part 1, but the beginning of Part 2 is still great through the Cool Girl (which is probably the best part of the book) bit.

Absalom, Absalom! can be really confusing, but it's so worth it.  It's possibly the best use of unreliable narrators I've ever read.  I'm not entirely sure where you are, so I won't spoil anything, but trust me, shit will continue to get even more fucked up through the duration of the book.

I like the part where he describes a guy eating something with lampreys in it.  I didn't even know that people eat lampreys.

@avclub-b81b91432eb4e240bd6b4380bf251a26:disqus Aren't they pulling a Deathly Hallows and unnecessarily splitting Mockingjay into two films?

Eh, I thought Mockingjay was easily the best of the series.  The ending (minus the unnecessary-but-not-terrible epilogue) was pretty impressive in its moral ambiguity.  (Spoilers)  I don't think most kids' trilogies would have the plot of the final book center around what amounts to a failed suicide mission that…

@avclub-e8e1ea96f3b1bf8e7400065325e188c8:disqus  Not to mention the ending to "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" has just about the greatest ending to any short story ever.  '"She would have been a good woman, if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life."'

Yeah, there's a lot of dead babies in McCarthy's work.  I'm pretty sure there's cannibals who eat dead babies in The Road, and on the second page of Suttree (which I'm reading now) he's describing a river and writes "and now and again the beached
and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed
and…

I finished reading Infinite Jest.  It was fantastic.  Not the absolute greatest thing I've ever read, but I could understand it being someone's absolute favorite novel, because I still  thought it it was really fucking great.

@avclub-130f14e3e5c0263f013b56d8c212f26a:disqus The thing is though, Pitt's over macho flaws aren't presented as such.  He's presented as unambiguously the coolest guy in the world in large part because of his extreme misogynistic/racist/homophobic macho-ness.  There's no subtlety to him; I think Cussler expects…

@avclub-09f700cd7fcae2e9f63ea6cdb7aa76b0:disqus It especially sucked for that guy since when you get trapped as an animal you're stuck with that animal's lifespan (except I think the Ellimist or whatever that god-like dude was made an exception in the case of Tobias), and he ended up as a rat or mouse or something,…

To add to what you said, it's probably also worth mentioning that in an earlier book Cassie (for reasons that I don't think she ever explains) let Tom (or whatever Jake's Yeerk-controlled brother's name was) escape something with the morphing cube, letting Yeerks gain the power to morph.  And I think Rachel is killed…

The dinosaur story was fucking awesome.  That was the one with that weird alien thing that was like one single conscious humanoid hive-colony being made out of ants.  Kind of completely outlandish, but really fucking cool and creepy when I was like 10 or 11.

Animorphs was really awesome when I was a kid, and K.A. Applegate was the first author I thought of when I read the title of the article.  I never made it much further than that trilogy plot-arc with that other kid who gains the power to morph, becomes a villain, and ends up (spoiler) trapped as a mouse for the rest…

Although, plot-wise, nothing Cussler writes will ever be as bad as his horribly LGBT-phobic novel Iceberg, in which Pitt pretends to be as stereotypically gay as possible to avoid being seen as a threat by the villain, and in which the attractive female character we're led to believe will be Pitt's love interest turns…

OK, but at the same time, this episode also shows that Finn isn't mature enough to have a legitimate and meaningful relationship, and that if he were to get back with FP, or start going out with someone else his age, even in the context of a relationship between two teenagers, it's going to be meaningless because he's…

So what you're saying is, local governments should be radically rearranged such that all US counties should be presided over by earls, right?  Because that would be pretty cool.

Speakin of loving Jake, I loved Jake's greeting to Finn the second time Finn calls him:  "Yo man, how's it goin'?  Terrible?"

I hope that episode is coming soon.  It's been a while since Magic Man made an appearance on the show.

I dunno, I think the show relates to real life, and has a ton of messages that can relate to real life issues for adolescents.  The core of this show is Finn growing up as a human kid in a world that, while absolutely nothing like the real world, still involves Finn confronting issues that most kids face, and thus, it…