John Warner

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

I am a big fan of reading, but even as big a fan as I am, I rarely think of a particular book as “fun.”Reading a great novel can be “compelling,” or “moving,” or “haunting,” or “penetrating.” We tend to think of “fun” as attached to other kinds of activities like a day at the amusement park, a nice hike in the woods, or jumping out of an airplane. (Scratch that last one.)I’m here to testify that Lincoln Michel’s new novel “Metallic Realms,” is more than fun; reading it was an absolute blast.

1 week ago | mcsweeneys.net | John Warner

Why would a fifty-five-year-old man try such a thing as Skittles POP’d Freeze Dried Candy, you might ask. I’ll tell you why. The grocery store was out of Nerds Very Berry Gummy Clusters, and a fiend needs his fix. We are in the midst of something like a golden age of candy technological advancement, and you never know when some new morsel capable of leaving your tongue scoured raw by repeated exposure to high-grade dextrose and food starch will hit the market.

2 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

In 2012, hip hop star Tupac Shakur performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival on stage with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, even though Tupac had been killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. The Tupac hologram was a little Hollywood special effects trickery that cost heavy sums, but now, thanks to generative artificial intelligence, we can resurrect just about any historical figure. Or can we?

3 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

Sometimes the world seems to send me subtle or not so subtle signs about what I’m supposed to be writing about. That happened to me this week. I’ve been reading Erik Baker’s “Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America” for about a month. It’s a “thick” book, dense with history and ideas, and I found myself needing to sit with each chapter a bit to let it sink in before moving on.

4 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

Some novels feel not so much written as conjured, as though the author has absorbed something from the larger ambient culture and distilled it into the characters and narrative. The result is like being put under a spell, an invitation to join some other mind in a shared dream. Not all books necessarily intend to do this, but when it happens, it can be a startling and powerful experience.