And so it is with Jack Pendarvis's determined first novel, "Awesome," a book that either is or isn't just that, depending upon your appetite for hyperbole and penis jokes.
'It is fleshy and voracious, grown fat upon its appetite for people and for food, for goods and drink; it consumes and excretes, maintained within a continual state of desire and greed.' It is Peter Ackroyd".
"Whether the E.S.M. will soon be in a position to lend to troubled sovereigns depends primarily upon market appetite for the vehicle's bonds," said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eurasia Group.
Both tales touch upon physical appetite, temptation, and foolish behaviour.
It all depends upon your appetite," someone famous once crooned sometime, somewhere on the radio during more than seven minutes of piano-filled airtime.
I can't be the only one who feels less inclined to cook because of this constant televised assault upon my appetite, or embarrassed that I might not be able to whip up something amazing out of three "well-sourced" ingredients.
Among those who take the former view, some say that morality depends upon religion in the way in which eating depends upon having an appetite: Religion provides the motivation that makes people behave morally.
Good recent ones include John Lanchester's ruminative "Debt to Pleasure,"in which a murderous gourmand ruminates upon his appetites; and Nora Ephron's "Heartburn," an eating- obsessed roman ?lef about the author's divorce from Carl Bernstein, has not lost its peppery wit.
As Edmund Burke put it: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
