Why I'm Here.

Hey there. My name is Brian Charles Clarke. I'm 22 years old and live with my parents in Pointe-Claire, Quebec,Canada. I work at a bookstore my eldest brother owns in downtown Montreal called Argo Bookshop. It's a new year and I have resolved to increase my creative output. I've been passionate about music for as long as I can remember and over the past year that I've worked at Argo I have become passionate about reading. So that's what this blog is going to be filled with, reviews and essays about music and books.
  Like most music nerds I listen to a little bit of everything. Less generally, I have a soft spot for punk rock and other loud and heavy genres.As of late,my favourite band is the Florida based punk band "Against Me!". Over the past few years I have developed a love for rap music and I'm still in the process of immersing myself in the culture. I also listen to pop music(because who doesn't need to music to smile and dance to sometimes?) so you may end up reading my thoughts on big names and albums; but none of these are "guilty pleasures". In my opinion, good music is good music whether or not the musician takes themselves seriously or considers their work "art".
    As for reading, I'm still in the process of figuring out what I like and what I don't. Over the past year I read a lot of classic literature, along with more contemporary titles to make sure I had a nice mix of the old and the new. This year I hope to read more contemporary writers, if only so I can fall in love with writers who I can expect new work from. Out of what I've read so far my favorite author is Franz Kafka and I also really enjoy Jack Kerouac(and plan to read more from the beat generation writers this year). I mostly read fiction but I do read some non-fiction. Mostly books about music and this year I started looking into philosophy and plan to continue you doing so. This year was my first that I kept track of all the booksI read and if you're interested in getting a better idea of what I've read here is that list:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Death of Ivan Ilyich/The Cossacks/Happily Ever After by Leo Tolstoy

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang

Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

Without Feathers by Woody Allen

Molloy by Samuel Beckett

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Lockpick Pornography by Joey Comeau

The Republic by Plato

For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Confessions by Saint Augustine

The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays by Albert Camus.

That's all for now, I hope you stick around and enjoy reading my reviews!