Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Kane Webb published his annual “Best Books of 2008” compendium today in what has become an annual tradition. Webb solicits submissions from various luminaries around Arkansas as to what they enjoyed reading in 2008 and why.
If you wanted to read it online, you could go here, but you have to be a subscriber to get past the firewall, because the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette hates you and doesn’t want you reading their content.
Or you can go here and read it in the Northwest edition, where much of the content is free online, but then they didn’t bother to post the entire article, cutting it off about halfway through, because the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette hates you and doesn’t want you reading their content. You probably won’t be able to make heads or tails of it anyway, because the formatting and paragraph breaks are all over the place, since they don’t bother formatting the text for an online environment, rendering it virtually unreadable. Do you know why they do it that way? Because the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette hates you and doesn’t want you reading their content.
Or, if you’re only interested in what I submitted, then I’ll just publish it for you here, because I generally like you and appreciate that you bother reading my content:
What I’d Say to the Martians and Other Veiled Threats, by Jack Handey.If you were sentient in the 1990s, you probably remember Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” on Saturday Night Live, back when that show was still funny, in which Handey would offer surreal and absurd bits of comic philosophizing. What I’d Say to the Martians collects some of Handey’s finest humor writing, including numerous essays, sketches and, yes, some of his favorite “Deep Thoughts.” There’s something to make you laugh out loud on every page.—David Kinkade, TheArkansasProject.com.Also recommends: Flash for Freedom, by George MacDonald Fraser; Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis; The Road, by Cormac McCarthy; Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis.
By the way, I’m adding all these books to that little Amazon widget over in the sidebar, and if you should happen to click through and buy them that way, The Arkansas Project will get like, I don’t know, maybe a nickel.
Over at the Think Tank blog, lonely misfit Blake Rutherford has also listed his best reads of 2008, and he and I apparently agree about the merits of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”
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