Guthrie the novelist

I'm adding House of Earth to my list.

There are passages in the novel where you can hear Woody Guthrie the lyricist. He plays with words, veers into poetry, wanders off into streams of consciousness. Brinkley says the book does not have a strong narrative, but Guthrie makes deft use of language to bring his characters to life.

"And he is able to really do a great job of capturing dialects and the slang expressions of a region," says Brinkley. "But it's done with a poetic flourish. You can almost speed-read the novel out loud, and when you do there is a musicality to it."

My recently revived interest in Billy Bragg also has me rethinking my early-2000s selloff of Mermaid Avenue, his collaboration with Wilco in which they created and performed music for a late-discovered trove of unpublished Guthrie lyrics. I don't remember how much I made from that sale, but I'm sure it was less than the ten bucks it will cost me to re-buy the album on iTunes. Unless I can find the CD at my local used record store.