This Book Will Change Your Life - Black Hole Blues by Patrick Wensink.

Club Sandwiches. Physics. And Kenny Rogers. That's a lot. Enough maybe. But that's not all. No, there's more, much more. As we read the Black Hole Blues by newest TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Patrick Wensink we thought about how we will sporadically bump into themes that somehow inch their way into a number of the books we're reading. This is unplanned usually. We think. But it happens. We can't remember when it happened last, but it did, and does, and here we are with the Black Hole Blues, a novel which has any number of wonderful things going on, but still had two things that especially jumped out at us. First, it is a tale of siblings, and sibling rivalry and old hurts, which reminded us of the new Barry Graham joint Nothing or Next to Nothing, and struck us as a theme we never write about, even think about really. Then there is the biopic thing Wensink has going on here, in this case that of a faux legendary country singer, which reminded us of The Mimic's Own Voice by Tom Williams and its use of the faux biopic, which again is a theme we never to think to write about ourselves. Yet there it is, right there, a whole history created just like that and right in front of us. Meanwhile, embedded in the middle of all this sibling rivalry, old hurts, Kenny Rogers and the whole biopic thing, there is a story about the end of the world, maybe, possibly, and something else, parody and satire and touches of magic realism, as guitars and tour buses reflect on the world around them. And look at that, again, stuff we just don't write, or even think about writing, which ultimately reminds us how wonderful it is to meet new writers and not only lose ourselves in their work, but find ourselves waiting in anticipation of what comes next. Assuming of course, that the world doesn't come to end before we have the chance to actually find out.