Reading List

Originally appearing in The New Yorker in 1967, The Pine Barrens is a non-fiction account of the New Jersey Pinelands, a largely rural and undeveloped land that takes up a large portion of the state.  Nearly 1.1 million acres are part of the national reserve and in 1983 the United Nations designated the land an international biosphere. The area is known for orchids and carnivorous plants as well as some of the purest water in the United States.  With all that said, there's also a whole bunch of weird shit happening down there. For starters, the area's inhospital living conditions made it the perfect place for the dregs of the society to hide, so in the early days, you had people like moonshiners and fugitives settling there. Today, the offspring of these dregs are called "Pineys" and they're basically like rednecks and live a sort of ecked out existence deep in the woods. Kind of like Cajuns. The Jersey Devil supposedly lurks there and there are more than a few ghost towns. It's a good story, with lots of lore but tons of facts and good "New Yorker" style nature writing. As more and more douches continue to flock up to the Catskills. You should play point with your friends and go here. We'll leave you with one of the best bands to ever come from Philadelphia, The Strapping Fieldhands, and their song "In the Pineys", which you can listen to from Siltbreeze here.

The first car bomb was actually a horse & carriage loaded with dynamite. It was masterminded by Italian anarchist, Mario Buda and was intened to take out J.P. Morgan near Wall Street.  The bomb didn't get him but it did ignite an acessible and inexpensive means of getting your point across.  This is a great and fascinating read, brought to you by Verso Books.

I've reposted this post and the post below because they seem somewhat relevant to the new Sherlock Holmes movie.

Gaston Leroux is a French writer best known for writing the Phantom of Opera, but his genius best shines in his book, The Mystery of the Yellow Room. The book stands out as being one of the first "Locked Room Mysteries" - a subgenre of fictional dectective crime novels where a crime, usually a murder, is committed under impossible circumstances, in a setting where no intruder could have entered or escaped. Hence the "Locked Room". The detective assigned to the case, as well as the reader are then driving through the story in search of a rational explanation as to how this could have happened. Like a game of wits, solving the puzzle makes for the ultimate page turner.

Though The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the novels of this kind and a very good one at that, some of the true masterpieces of the genre come from John Dickson Carr aka Carter Dixon, whose caper, The Hollow Man is consider to be the greatest locked room mystery of all time. Below is incomplete list of locked room mysteries well worth your time.

The Naked Civil Servant
Memoir
Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp was an English born writer, theater performer, gay icon, raconteur and eccentric. He moved to New York in 1981 and died in 1999. He is said to have possessed a collection of scarves that rivaled Imelda Marcos' shoe collection.  Those scarves and just about everything else can be found here.