I heard it's terrible.

More reverb!

It was also in King of the Hill. She did her vocal work topless for the episode "Husky Bobby."

I wasn't crazy about the first season of Veep. I thought the universal consensus on JLD being brilliant was spot on, but the rest of the cast didn't really gel for me. However, seasons 2 and 3 really skyrocketed in quality and it turned into possibly the best ensemble comedy on tv. You have some great stuff to look…

which half?

I watched Woody Allen's Love & Death for the first time. Fucking hysterical. Maybe my new favorite of his. Diane Keaton is a goddamn national treasure.

I have Russell Crowe's mug staring at me from the cover of Master & Commander right now.

Read the Dunk & Egg novellas. They take place about a century prior to the events of Song of Ice and Fire, and they are wonderful. They're lighter in tone (relatively speaking) and you can polish each one off in 4-5 hours. I hope he gets back to writing them at some point.

That is the perfect encapsulation of how I would describe what he does! I've been saying that he has an uncanny knack for tossing off universal truths on every page, but I knew there had to be a better way to put it!

He gets so much true-to-life stuff in there that it just blows my mind. There's a scene where two newlyweds are planning their first party at their new crib, and Tolstoy describes their thought process of making sure this party goes just like all of the other parties from their circle of friends so that no one will…

I really enjoyed Handmaid's Tale but thought The Blind Assassin blew it out of the water.

I finally got around to reading me some Lovecraft. In fact, I read pretty much all of Lovecraft this year, a couple early short stories excepted. He was far and away the best thing I read, totally surpassing the hype. His writing is claustrophobic and dread-inducing, while at the same time he is describing space…

Black Swan Green is a wonderful book regardless, and it does sort of have a gimmick. It's about a year in the life of a teenager, and each chapter is a different month. They almost function as 12 interconnected short stories.

I have not read the book, but being a long-term Chicago-ite, I have seen that book being read on the train more than any other. Most of my friends have read it too, and I'm pretty sure all of them without exception felt the exact same way about it that you do. I can't think of anyone who was fully onboard with the…

Have you done the Malazan Book of the Fallen yet? I finished it off a couple months ago, and I had very mixed feelings on it.

Black Swan Green, next to Thousand Autumns…, is his least gimmicky. And I say that as someone who has loved everything the man has written (I'm about 200 pages into Bone Clocks right now and enjoying it immensely). I usually tell people to start with BSG as it's his most accessible and down-to-earth book.

TOO SOON

Did you then explain what the Solnit book was really about to her?

I agree it's his masterpiece, but I can also see him topping it considering how relatively little he's written so far and the fact that my favorites have been his most recent ones. He has just kept getting better!

I love everything about that album with the bold exception of Chris Rock's monologue