Also in the “recent reviews” camp: at Tiny Mix Tapes, I discussed  the Carissa’s Wierd collection They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave: Songs 1996-2003. So hey, you might want to check that out as well.

In the first, Amy Klein, guitarist for the excellent punk rock band Titus Andronicus, takes a look at the new issue of Rolling Stone and its handling of gender. She then ties this in with a larger political narrative which, I would argue, makes no small amount of sense. Definitely worth a read. (Hat-tip to Maura for the link.)

The second is Jamie Peck’s profile of Frankie Rose for NY Press. Which both functions as both a fine overview of the musical history of the drummer-turned-bandleader (whose upcoming album is terrific) and a spot-on take of the gender issues contained in the indie rock scene of today. (Of which, sadly, there are many.)

Where for right now she is discussing well-liked Canadian actors visiting the city in which she resides in order to eat pizza and test-drive electric cars. Also promised: contrarian thoughts on popular dytopian YA novels. Awesome, says I.

It’s possible that Krilanovich’s gangs of pill-popping, train-jumping, Pacific Northwestern vampires are vampiric in metaphor only. It’s never clear, but that lack of clarity is the point — somewhere partway through the novel, its nameless narrator left to her own devices, it becomes apparent that the shape of her head is far more important than whether or not some straight-edge Van Helsing will eventually show up, stake in hand.

There’s also some discussion of the book at HTML Giant, and a trailer for it below. Something that didn’t make it in to my review but may be relevant to yesterday’s Gowns-related post: I found myself mentally cueing up Gowns’ “White Like Heaven” as I read Krilanovich’s novel. Which is likely not going to make a lot of sense to anyone reading this who is not, well, me. But still.

For what it’s worth, some context for why I’m so fond of the music of each:

• Two takes on crime fiction, via Tony O’Neill’s Sick City and a Charlie Huston essay;
• Thoughts on Pioneer One;
• Signs of Alan Moore’s influence on the Mike Carey/Peter Gross series The Unwritten (spurred on in part by this Techland discussion).

Also, a few of the reviews that I wrote for the now-apparently-defunct Lit Mob will be given new life at Vol.1. The first, on Tony O’Neill’s Down and Out on Murder Mile, is now up.

(I am also going to try to do these sorts of posts more frequently.)

My second sudden reaction of the night had to do with the amount of classical music in my collection. In my apartment, I generally listen to music in one of two rooms: my office, where the preferred format is digital and the playback device is my computer; and my living room, where the turntable and CD changer live. All of which means that, while most of the music I have exists in multiple formats, some can only be played in one room or another. And while some of the classical music I have might be well-suited to editing, iTunes (understandably) doesn’t default to a “search by composer” mode, which can make things problematic.

Alternately: take it away, Nico Muhly:

If you listen to a lot of classical music, you know what I’m talking about: whole CD’s, with each track assigned to a different artist. It’s like, Lorraine Hunt with the orchestra of the age of whatever. Lorraine Hunt + Random Tenor + That orchestra + That Lutenist whose name I forgot. Lorraine Hunt + That Lutenist + That Oboe d’Amore-ist whose name I forgot.

Exactly.

Right about now, I’m about two-thirds of the way through the novel. (So…two delays, then?) I have to say, I’m kind of regretting not emulating the  daily Infinite Jest blogging done recently over at Bookavore. Three Delays is the kind of novel where my reactions shifted wildly every sixty pages or so, and I suspect that being able to track those shifts in opinion over time would have been entertaining. I began by finding the narrator (Billy) difficult to take, obsessive and temperamental and, generally, the kind of guy you’d hate to wind up talking with at a bar at three a.m. Then Billy let slip something about his past as a child preacher, and my take on him shifted; there was still a bit of an overly hard-boiled quality to the narration, but it too slipped away, and the perspective shifted so that the gap between author and narrator was more visible.

Two-thirds of the way through, and I’m still hooked, though a lot will depend on how Smith brings it all together. It doesn’t shy away from grand themes: love! And religion! And madness! And drugs! And art! It’s written in a style that alternately dwells on the moment and is effortlessly able to condense years of shared history into a few sentences. Still: for a story that’s intimate in scope, Smith’s ambitions are grand indeed. I have a day or two to go, and I’m fascinated to see where it’s all going to end up.