Moving here from there

I have a website where these old posts used to be housed. But that site has turned into a portfolio and services portal, not a good place to house my thoughts about the books I'm reading. So here we are.

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2010: January to June Favorite Reads

The best books I’ve read between January and June of 2010: Dandelion Wine , Ray Bradbury. First time I’ve read this an adult. It’s not quite cohesive as a novel, but wallops a double-dose of nostalgia: Bradbury’s for his childhood, and mine, for reconnecting with an old beloved book. Brooklyn , by Colm Toibin. Love this simple, rich story of a young woman’s maturation-through-immigration. Caution: there is one section that will make you cry buckets of salty, sad tears. I knew when I was in the middle of this tender novel that I wished it were three times as long. It's quiet and understated and elegant, this story of a young Irish woman who comes to America and finds her own strength and self. Reminiscent of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , and an immersible world unto itself. Underworld by Don DeLillo. Epic monster of a story that seems to presuppose the horrors of the 2000s by looking at the less-but-still horrific 1950s through the 1990s.* True Grit by Charles Po...

2016 Reading Notes

My reading came to a screeching halt after the election and I've been having trouble resuming it since. But I did have a good reading year before that day. White Noise by Don DeLillo. First read in 1998, re-read in 2016. I remembered that White Noise is about supermarkets and Hitler studies. I remember loving it in 1998, but little else. What I rediscovered is that this novel is full of anxiety, dread, distrust of systems and data, environmental waste, precocious children, familial and romantic loves, and the repression of our fundamental fear of death. It's satirical but also mildly terrifying. I am happy to say that it's still a five-star read. I also read DeLillo's Zero K, which was fine but unexceptional and probably very close to the future as elites hoard all the money and try to preserve themselves past death, waiting out the demise of most of mankind. I was happy to discover three Louise Erdrich novels: Love Medicine; The Round House; and LaRose . Loved the...

Tobias Wolff Some of the stories in In the Garden of the North American Martyrs 1. Next Door The narrator and his wife, unnamed, live next door to a man who abuses his wife and dog, and who is hostile to the narrator and his wife. The neighbor urinates on the narrator's flowers while the narrator watches. The narrator characterizes the neighbor as "hairy" and likens him to an Airedale. The narrator does not take action against the violence; he and his wife listen to it in impotent despair. The narrator cultivates plants and the garden; his wife has been ill and rebuffs her husband's sexual advances. This odd and lonely life seems to have been exacerbated by a particularly violent encounter the pair witness from the window: the man beats the dog into submission and then he and his wife have passionate sex, all visible through the window. The narrator's wife here turns against the neighbor woman, judging her to be complicit in the abuse. The final sentence, w...

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