Life Itself by Roger Ebert

       Looking back on it, the influence Roger Ebert had on pop-culture throughout my youth is unreal. Even when he appeared as a cartoon parody, he was immediately recognizable. I was probably a little too young to recognize his insight and his importance then; even now, I’d have to conduct a thorough perusal of his film reviews to really understand just how perceptive and influential he’s been to the movie industry. A friend of mine has put me on to some of Ebert’s viewpoints and in turn I felt compelled to read his memoir Life Itself.

Life Itself achieves what memoirs are meant to do: they provide some backstory to the author, explore and review some of the industry-related accomplishments of that person’s life, and discuss the trials and tribulations that give their life drama, depth, and texture. Ebert even makes a reference to the cliché of all memoirs starting with notable members of the central character’s ancestry before he cheekily does the same, diving into some backstory for his grandparents and the like. From there, he gives a reasonably chronological account of his life with some tangents and lack of linearity, each section designed to give some insight into his perspective.

The scope of the book is impressive. Ebert talks about everything from his first girlfriends to writing for his school newspaper and submitting his first articles as he worked towards being a newsman. He talks about his transition into working in television and his routine appearances at film festivals and even some work he did consulting on films or speaking with hot shot directors. His career is without a doubt an impressive one, but it’s the personal parts that really make the memoir notable. 

The book also captures a cultural moment, explored perhaps most specifically when Ebert reflects on his favourite Americana diner. Ebert encapsulates a historical ‘moment’ and evokes that 1950s and 1960s diner culture that seems a prototypical experience. Something that strikes me as a little funny is that in both Roger Ebert’s memoir and David Lynch’s memoir there’s an affinity for ‘hamburger and milkshake’ culture and I just now looked up Ebert’s thoughts on Lynch, suspecting they might be kindred spirits—only to find that Ebert panned Lynch’s early work and praised his latter ones. I digress.

Roger Ebert presents an American life, and I was pleasantly surprised by how progressive Ebert was. There’s always a risk that public figures of the era botched their involvement in the civil rights movement, and while Ebert didn’t stake his claim to fame, I appreciated that he reported on his involvement and engagement in anti-racism initiatives. While grappling with questions of faith, Ebert demonstrates a great deal of thoughtfulness, doubt, and concern with issues of religion, and self-consciously slips out of easy categorization. He brings that up in the context of defending the LGBTQ+ community, and again I found myself heartened by Ebert’s outspokenness on historically oppressed groups.

To return to the personal level, though, the book is touching and funny, as well. Some chapters recount stories with old friends and build towards what is essentially a punchline. The humour extends into character studies of famous personages. There’s a chapter about John Wayne, for example, that reads like a Gatsbyesque character sketch. His chapter about writing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is an absurd read, but also has a thoughtfulness and reflective aspect that feels wonderfully sincere.

But wait. I’ve drifted away from the personal again.

Life Itself has a number of touching accounts of Ebert’s personal experiences. In an early chapter, for example, he discusses the death of his beloved childhood dog and that classic tragedy of an American boyhood hits hard. There are a number of other personal topics discussed with such candor that it gives the book a special sizzle. Some of these topics are light and beautiful: his characterization of his wife Chaz and their relationship is lovely and it’s clear from the way he describes her just how enamored he was with her. One of the ways that comes out in his discussion of his alcoholism and the way Chaz helped him through it. The memoir reflects on the power of AA in Ebert’s life despite his initial reluctance. He discusses his regular attendance at meetings and the way he was able to find AA meetings anywhere he went essentially within ten minutes. The memoir takes an optimistic and inspiring stance towards recovery and offers some good insight into addiction as a whole.

Ebert’s health is a focus in the latter part of the book. He discusses his weight, but more so in terms of public perception. He reflects on how he was seen (the fat one), especially in contrast to Gene Siskel (the skinny one). Ebert offers an engaging perspective about how media and society reinforces expectations around weight and health. There’s a pain there in recognizing how cruel people were, and seeing it from a man’s point of view (and not from a toxic man) gives a fresh dimension to the conversation. Following that, there’s also a lengthy section about Ebert’s cancer and the impact on his life (i.e. losing a portion of his jaw, losing his ability to eat, losing his ability to speak). In one section, he discusses his interview with Esquire and the photo they chose of him: one that put on full display his facial deformity. Based on his narration, I feel really compelled to go back and watch his television appearances following his cancer to really appreciate the courage and strength it took for Ebert to return to public life after losing his ability to speak, which was clearly a devastating transition for him—but not one that ever reduced him to self-pity.

On the topic of Ebert’s television appearances, it was entertaining to hear about the frenemyship Ebert shared with Gene Siskel. He recounts times of their disagreement (and there are some clear public and televised ones) and the way they challenged each other. He characterizes their relationship as one of challenge, critique, and ribbing. In Ebert’s account, Siskel always had clever and cruel comments to make about Ebert and made him a punching bag of sorts. At the same time, Ebert perpetually asserts the depth of their friendship despite and perhaps because of their friction. It’s a nice insight into what became one of the most recognizable duos of the 90s—up to and including a reflection on the passing of Gene Siskel.

Life Itself offers a great deal of humour and tenderness towards Roger Ebert’s life. It’s clear he was a thoughtful, reflective man, and the sheer breadth of the text has a lot to offer. I sometimes wonder if a memoir is meant to serve as an ad of sorts for a person’s career. If I take that premise, I would say that Life Itself is an effective one: I feel more driven to revisit Ebert’s oeuvre and television show. He is a critic that has a lot to offer—ironically, perhaps, he keeps his commentary on film to a relative minimum in this memoir—and hearing more about his perspectives on life helps to elevate his significance to me.

May we all live our lives so fully. Happy reading!

The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play by Alexander Kriss

  In 2023, I read Getting Gamers by Jamie Madigan, which uses psychological principles and experiments to explain why people who play video games play the way they do and how they engage with one another. I found it a really illuminating text and I’ve been looking for other texts that delve into analysis of video games, their impacts on player behaviour, and so on. To that end, I decided to read The Gaming Mind by Alexander Kriss. Kriss is a clinical psychology with an interest in video games, but his approach is largely the inverse of how Madigan approaches interpretations of gamer behaviour.

Rather than taking a look at how games influence our behaviour, Alexander Kriss holds up the mirror: how do our gaming behaviours reflect our other habits of mind? For instance, how does a woman’s obsession with Candy Crush speak to the lack of control she feels over her life? How does our relationship with violence impact how we engage with games?

The best part of the book—or at least the part I found most engaging—was the opening chapter: “Me, You, and Silent Hill 2.” The opening chapter establishes Kriss’ experience as a psychoanalyst and how he is made responsible for the “gamer kid” who needed help, and whose therapist-group-assigned moniker required deconstruction. Running parallel, Kriss establishes his own coming to terms with the “gamer” label for himself, beginning with his experience of playing Mist with his father, his coming into the Tomb Raider series and Ape Escape. While playing games, Kriss developed a friendship with another boy—one less interested in gaming—who later took his own life.

From there, the chapter discusses Silent Hill 2, which I already find deeply engrossing and rife with possibility for analysis. Kriss provides a beautiful account of the game’s haunting premise and analysis of the characters. What is really most compelling is Kriss’ discussion of the eight multiple endings of the game. To unlock different endings, there are different conditions, including inconsequential actions like how many times you inspect the photo of your deceased wife in your inventory. One of the endings is James, the main character, killing himself. To unlock that ending, you have to play the majority of the game at low health. Kriss explains how he could never play the game that way and never cope with the prospect of the central character killing himself at the end. It’s a stunning and sincere discussion of our relationship to depression and mental illness and the way our game behaviours can give a window into the player.

That first chapter wowed me. From there, the rest of the book was good but didn’t quite hit the same highs for me. Perhaps because the case studies are more focused on the patient rather than critique of games, or perhaps because the games referenced haven’t been part of my gaming repertoire. The chapters deal with violence, addiction, health, treatment of others in multiplayer games, and so on. There’s a lot to work with, but your enjoyment of the book will probably depend on what resonates with you at the personal level.

Either way: happy reading. Happy gaming!

Take the Long Way Home by Jon Claytor

        There seems to be an increasing canon of autobiographical works presented as graphic novels, and Jon Claytor has now added his own entry with the Take the Long Way Home, a story about traveling across the country and back for an artist’s retreat.

The art style is more or less sketchy and unfleshed out in a free and breezy way with some special attention played to the natural world and the view from the dashboard. It’s pretty inviting. The story, also, is pretty sketchy. It’s a series of vignettes that does not really have much of a consistent build towards a climax. It’s a road trip where we stop in various cities, check in with families members and friends, and then move on. The main dramatic tension of the text is Claytor’s struggles with alcoholism and the moments that he thinks he might take a drink or dreams that he has.

As a result, the book is more like a series of loose threads handled with an engaging style but also tact. For instance, Claytor finds out that he has a long lost brother that he has never met; his kids are extremely invested in finding him—but that’s, maybe, the subject of another book. Similarly, he finds out about his parents and a number of “characters” have wild backstories, but he suggests it is not his story to tell.

There’s a kind of beautiful tenderness to the book that is worth noting. Early on, Claytor recounts his challenges with alcoholism and attempted suicide and it gives the pages that follow a heartbreaking kind of quality. The book is, on the whole, pretty uplifting. There are so many personal connections and the book works as a celebration and gift for those special relationships in his life. If there is a climax, I would make the case that it is as Claytor returns home and reflects on the people he has learned from, spread out over six pages with four portraits each interspersed with thoughts from the drive.

The personable nature of the book is really endearing. The phone calls home have a special sincerity and a clear appreciation for quiet moments. In one scene, Claytor calls his children from Kamloops. He calls his children “turkeys” and they call him “pops” and they are “reading about zombies.” Meanwhile, the family dog has a thought bubble as he sleeps that says “I’m a happy dog” (199). It’s really cute, but one of the best things about it is that when he calls he just listened to them turn pages.

I also really liked the interactions between animals that he imagines. There’s a sequence with wolves where one of them confesses to the other that he tried to be a badass lone wolf but the truth is that he’d rather spend time together. It’s a beautiful exchange: “You and me? Together?” / “Forever!” and then a full-page illustration that has the two wolves side by side with the caption, “Now, let’s go fuck shit up! Like the badass wolves we are” (163). There are also interactions with birds, bears, and rabbits, which take on a symbolic significance, as well.

Overall, Take the Long Way Home is a lovely journey full of that introspection and sincerity of expression that makes up for the seeming deficit of plot. I liked it. It felt truly personal and a book built for connection.

Happy reading!

The Punishment by Joseph Dandurand

Back in December, I was in Whistler B.C. and stumbled across Joseph Dandurand’s collection of poems, The Punishment, and was immediately engaged by its cover art. At the time I picked it up, I was thoroughly entrenched in an additional qualifications course about First Nations, Indigenous, and Métis cultures. I didn’t feel up to the task of taking on additional related reading over and above my studies (Dandurand is a member of the Kwantlen First Nation), but after some time passed, The Punishment called to me from my unread shelf and it was, as expected, pretty darn heavy.

The Punishment is a collection of poems written with clear and accessible language, many in a narrative form in the register of fables or Indigenous stories. The poems address the traumas of colonialism head-on, and going through the collection provides an intimate portrait of the artist’s life. The poems address the legacy of residential schools, given that his mother was in one and has religious trauma that is passed along to Dandurand and exacerbated by his time at Catholic school. Incidentally, several of the poems address Dandurand’s experiences being bullied and getting into fights at school. Some of the poems address his teenage and adult years, specifically in his experience with addiction and mental illness, including time spent in an institution. In the final section of the collection, there are more poems about Dandurand’s writing career and his family life, raising two children and losing his ex to an overdose. As I said, pretty darn heavy.

I think it’s pretty common for people with significant trauma to return to the sources of their pain as an attempt to process and move forward. As a personal project, then, I hope The Punishment helps to engage in the act of healing. As an aesthetic project—at the risk of sounding unkind—I think The Punishment needed some editing. The collection is just under 150 pages, which is somewhat long for a poetry collection as is, and I felt that the subject matter got a little repetitive. There’s a fine balance that’s hard to pinpoint—poets often deal with the same themes over and over, but when specific anecdotes are repeated it seems like a missed opportunity to cull to the most effective poems.

That being said, there are some dimensions that I thought were particularly compelling. For instance, there were poems about residential schools, but the real drama is in their legacy. One poem recounts an arson at a Church, which was both contemporaneous and a finely wrought narrative scene. A few of the poems address Dandurand’s mother’s experience at residential school, which is painful enough to witness, but the depiction of intergenerational trauma is what is most powerful. Dandurand’s mother clearly had an awful experience at the schools but nonetheless grows to love the Lord and pushes her young son to accept God, too. It’s such an interesting tension between having compassion for her and being incensed at her treatment of her son, and the way Dandurand constructs the situation across multiple poems is excellent.

My favourite moment in the collection, bar none, comes in the poem “Sinking In.” The build-up to the moment is a direct address to those who, like me, dare to paraphrase other peoples’ stories. He writes, “When I walk away, do not stare at me / to turn and tell differently the words / that I have carried on my back since I was five” (29). The line is appropriate to the moment recounted in anecdote, but also seems to stand in for all victims of abuse, especially Indigenous victims of abuse, whose stories are recycled by White audiences like myself. What am I doing? Rather than sharing the words as they are written, I am summarizing and commenting and inserting myself where I don’t belong. Setting the politics of that aside for a second, the passage I just quoted continues with a brilliantly constructed line break: “that I have carried on my back since I was five / and the first cold touch of a priest destroyed me / into the man I am today” (29). Ending the line about the priest on the words “destroyed me” encompasses a whole world, but the addition of “destroyed me / into the man I am today” is great inversal of how we normally think of our identities. We are made into the men we are; to frame that as a destruction is replete with layers of thoughtfulness. It implies so much in just a few words, reversing our usual thinking that we progress smoothly from childhood to adulthood. That one phrase makes the collection. 

In examining the long-term effects of childhood trauma, Dandurand’s poem “The Parade” provides a narrativized experience of life in an institution. He narrates how they are provided with cotton slippers and lose them. The painting of the inmates is not at all flattering; it paints them as drooling and slipperless and yet provides them with the human dignity we are all afforded: “we all are, yes, / we are all worth saving in one way or another” (102). Dandurand looks at the parade of medicated people and recognizes that he will eventually join their ranks. One of the stanzas offers an interesting inversion, dozens of pages later, to the idea of being “destroyed” into the man he is today. It begins with a doctor advising Dandurand to stay a while longer, take his meds, and offers him the chance to “become the man / with those around me giving me cigarettes” (103). There’s a selfless devotion while he remains a higher status than the other patients: “I will fix / any problem or person for them and soon I’ve been there / for six months when the doctor finally says I should go ho / home now and that they’ve become concerned / that even the nurses fear me” (103). He is offered the chance at rehabilitation and devotes himself to others, though the nurses still fear him for his fighting with other patients. Dandurand balances the theme so beautifully that people are worth saving while still being flawed—it comes out in different forms, which provides the collection some rich layering. It is clear that his institutionalization is not as helpful as one would hope, and there’s a kind of resignation when Dandurand is provided with a pair of shoes—this time to leave. Dandurand imagines the “parade” the new patient “will soon be joining / with all the gods of the place walking and talking / the truth, as if the truth mattered” (103). It’s a powerful final line, precisely because of its cynicism that any person’s truth is taken seriously by those who are supposed to help.

Ironically, The Punishment offers some harsh truths about history, about identity, about wellness—hopefully truths that we take seriously. The overall project is effective, if repetitive, in working through some of the nuances attached to experiences, especially related to Indigenous trauma. It’s by no means an uplifting text, though there are moments of joy, but it is one of resilience: it is survival on display. Despite tragedy, despite loss, despite grief: we persevere.

With that in mind, happy reading!

Hello, My Name Is Henry by Micah Schnabel

    Micah Schnabel is a musician that writes beautiful, tragic, happysad, funny, sincere, poetic songs and I adore him for it. He plays in punk bands like Two Cow Garage and Call Me Rita, but I am perpetually stunned by his work as a solo artist and it would break my heart to find out he wasn’t the radically authentic, kind, timid person I perceive him to be. I’ve provided an obscene amount of adjectives in these first sentences, but I want to emphasize how much I appreciate his musical endeavours [a playlist provided for you in the comments section while you read this review]. You can imagine how surprised I was to find out he had written a novel, a discovery which was promptly followed by a purchase.

    Hello, My Name Is Henry is a debut slice-of-life novel that expands upon the narrative recounted in Micah Schnabel’s song of the same name from his album Your New Norman Rockwell. The titular character in both is a 28 year old man working at a convenience store who feels that life is passing by around him but can’t seem to escape the cycle of poverty and mental illness that hovers around his past. The book is a pretty scathing critique of Americana—more on that shortly—and has a direct tone that reads like a progressive version of Bukowski.

    The novel retains the sincerity of Schnabel’s lyrics, though often presents itself as more prosaic than his musical work. I think of the way he builds scenes in “#33 Dryer” and “Emergency Room” as essentially perfect illustrations-in-words. The novel is somewhat more on-the-nose in tackling issues, with the central character often narrating exactly what the problems in America are: systemic poverty in small communities and the lack of responsiveness of politicians, the proliferation of harmful addictions and the shocking attempts to reduce the accessibility of naloxone (even among first responders!!), racism, toxic masculinity, and so on. I agree with essentially all of his views—and I appreciate that some of the minor conflicts in the book are Henry responding to homophobic and racial slurs; the way he strives to take action is an encouraging layer to a character who is often unmotivated and sedentary.

    You get a pretty good sense of Henry’s views and values throughout the book and the small town has a plethora of other characters. In some ways, the novel reads as a series of portraits and I find the characters to be pretty nicely developed. That said, Schnabel breaks a central rule of literary fiction: characters are introduced and shortly after are provided long monologues expressing their views, intentions, and life stories. There’s a transparency (or perhaps authenticity) to the characters that gives them a charm, even if the writer inside me keeps shouting to show not tell. It’s especially strange because, presumably, Henry has known these people for years and in a small town everyone knows each others’ business, but it just so happens to be the case that in the duration of the novel they pour their hearts out. Just suspend your disbelief a little bit, deal?

    Of Henry’s interactions with other characters, I find the most beautiful and compelling to be his friendship with Josh, who is an effective foil for Henry. Josh moved to “the city” years earlier to make a life for himself, but still maintains a correspondence with Henry. The two write letters back and forth, and Josh continually encourages Henry to come join him, but Henry is always held up by being too broke for a bus ticket. There’s a tragic bent to their friendship, where Josh seems to really want the best for Henry, but Henry is too stunted to make a move for himself. What really resonated for me, though, is that the two bond over a comic series called Memory Currency [a title which reappears as a song on Schnabel’s album The Teenage Years of the 21st Century]. The fictional (?) comic is described in a really compelling way, where the artist seems to perpetually shift. The two characters have been reading the comic for years but can’t make sense of it, though they come to some interpretive breakthroughs (the comic is the writer dreaming his audience? the continual changes of the central character’s design signal a shift in direction or a new concept being introduced?). I really liked the way they spoke about that and it rang so true in a way some of the dialogue does not.

    I am hesitant to spoil the ending of the book because it revolves around Henry’s friendship with Josh. There is some carefully placed foreshadowing around 40 pages before the climax of the book and while I had somewhat predicted what would happen, the delivery in the final pages of the book is fantastic. The devil’s in the details, but the tension of the final scene is very well-crafted and heartbreaking, with the novel’s final line being a nice encapsulation of the central theme of the book: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.”

    The book is laced with tragedy. Even moments that inspire rage are given a kind of pity that is hard to ignore; people often talk about how we need to be united in these divisive times, and the sympathy Henry (and Schnabel) extend to others seems a good model for how to start. There are some non-starters (when little white boys are play fighting, Henry extends sympathy for their small town lives, but when they use the N-word he says “fuck ‘em” and walks off), but in most cases Henry finds ways of being sympathetic to others (when a drug addict he knows tries to rob the convenience store he accidentally shoots a gun at Henry and Henry makes sure not to report the culprit to the police).

    There’s a powerful scene that I think encapsulates the tenderness of Henry’s character. One night, his grandfather has an episode and Henry’s mother and grandmother have to go out looking for him. When they find him, he has a shotgun and after they seem to calm him down, he walks up to his wife and daughter and kills himself in front of them. Henry doesn’t get the details of what happened until a few years later, but he knows something has happened. The tenderness and self-effacement he demonstrates in the morning is beautiful. Henry narrates that he had been up all night and “when [he] pretended to wake up that morning, [he] rose slowly, making noise to let my mother know that I was awake” (76). He shows such consideration for his mother where he does not want to take her off guard, and then he “walked slowly across the shag carpet. [He] gave [his] mother a short hug and said good morning” (76). There’s something touching about the way he mothers his mother in the scene, and it’s met with a beautiful and devastating reciprocity:

“She asked if I wanted a bowl of cereal.

I said I did.

The only other thing I remember is that we were out of milk” (76).

The scene is beautifully constructed with a devastating event, moments of tenderness, and it’s then undercut by a reminder of the poverty of the central characters. The structure of the novel is set up in a series of short chapters, which gives Schnabel the opportunity to deliver short gut punches strategically to punctuate the central points of the main story.

    When it comes to the main story, I suppose you could say that it’s about Henry wanting to leave town, though it’s a portrait of the town as much as anything. About halfway through the novel, there’s a central event that precipitates a number of changes. Henry witnesses a car accident where the driver runs a red light and runs over a little girl. The driver is a scumbag who keeps offering defences for why it’s the girl’s fault. Meanwhile, Henry moves the girl from under the car and cradles her in his arms, singing to her while she passes away. Schnabel returns to the idea several times that she gets heavier and that’s when Henry knows she has died, even before it’s confirmed. It’s a devastating touch.

    The little girl’s death catalyzes a number of deep conversations with people who are concerned for his well-being. The best, in my opinion, is the conversation Henry has with the owner of the convenience store. In that scene, the reactions in the conversation seem true and Schnabel uses one of the best examples of personification that comes to mind in my recent reading. The boss “stops talking for a beat, as if he’s waiting for me to stop him. I don’t say anything. The hum of the cooler seems to get louder for a moment, but I know it’s just the silence turning up the volume on us” (66). I love that line for two reasons: one, it just feels like an experience I’ve had where all of a sudden noise gets louder at an awkward moment. The second is that in the construction of the sentence, the silence is turning up the volume of the cooler—something that is soundless driving up the sound of something else is a compelling line, and I like that it can also be read as silence turning up its own volume. 

    This paragraph will spoil a key plot point, so skip ahead two paragraphs (or just listen to my playlist for a while and scroll). Following the little girl’s death, a revelation comes to light that seems to me to be too coincidental. The girl’s dad is a real scumbag who doesn’t care about his daughter dying because her mom cut him out of her life. He returns to town now in the hopes of ‘being there’ for his ex, but he’s an alcoholic that seems incapable of being there even for himself. There’s a sequence of events that seems improbable: Josh comes to town to check on Henry and they get into a fight with the girl’s dad, Rick. Rick later shows up at Henry’s apartment and robs and attacks him with a knife. At the end of the altercation, it’s revealed that Rick is Henry’s long lost dad.

    Beyond the coincidence, there’s a bit of a contradiction in the text. Henry judges Rick for being a terrible father to the girl and Rick says that even though he was bad, she was his blood and so he still has a claim to her as his daughter. The underlying message seems to be that blood is not so important as connection and actually doing the work of maintaining relationships, which I can endorse. After Henry realizes the girl was his half-sister, though, he starts referring to her as his sister pretty consistently. It’s an interesting contradiction, since he only met her a few moments before her death and yet now claims that bond. Initially I chalked up the inconsistency to some underlying biases that slipped into the text, but the more I think about it the more it seems like it’s another example of the final line’s aphorism: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.” He never wants to be like his deadbeat father, and yet despite his best efforts here he is replicating that same narrative that allows Rick to be a father without performing fatherhood. It’s a pretty clever spin, actually.

    Overall, Hello, My Name Is Henry is a touching novel that delivers all the genuine sincerity of Schnabel’s music, if sometimes more prosaic than necessary. That said, the more I think about the book the more I like it. Writing this review has forced me to process some of the things I overlooked or dismissed during my reading. The novel has that meandering quality that is the taste of many, encapsulating something like a complicated kindness by Miriam Toews or even a less problematic The Catcher in the Rye. There’s a lot of positives for Schnabel’s debut novel, and I’m confident that with a second novel we would see a continued refinement of his writing style, incorporating more of the poetic quality from his music.

    I recognize my own position here as a reviewer of books: I know that when I recommend a book to you, it could take days or weeks or months or years before you get around to it. I have the rare opportunity here to make a more immediate recommendation. Do yourself a favour and listen to some of Micah Schnabel’s music while you wait for your online independent bookstore order to arrive.

    Happy reading!

Listening Playlist:

#33 Dryer

Jazz and Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Emergency Room

How to Ride a Bike

The Interview

Cash 4 Gold

Hello, My Name Is Henry

Memory Currency

Coin$tar

Cincinnati, Ohio

Oh, What a Bummer

American Throwaway

Gentle Always

Remain Silent

A Celebration

Death Defying Feats

New Shoes