This weekend I finished Susan Orlean's The Library Book and ... wow. I will have more to say about this book but for now I want to give a slow-clap standing ovation to the writing. This was my first Orlean and she is remarkable. Take this early description of the Los Angeles CentralLibrary: ...the neighborhood … Continue reading The Library Book
Month: May 2019
On Toggling Between Books, or the Strange Fixed Marriage of Julia Child and Carlo Rovelli
Listening to: A Spotify playlist where I'm dumping one-off songs I want to keep listening to. Drinking: A Firestone Walker IPA. Traditionally—since childhood—I've been a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader. The first cracks in that tendency probably came in graduate school, a time when it's relatively impossible to be reading only one thing at a time. … Continue reading On Toggling Between Books, or the Strange Fixed Marriage of Julia Child and Carlo Rovelli
On ‘Lost and Wanted’
I wasn't sure, at first, how I was feeling about Nell Freudenberger's Lost and Wanted. It seemed like a textbook case of why teachers give the advice to "show don't tell." But I found myself identifying with the structured, reserved, cerebral narrator and drawn in by the topical structure—astrophysics—for which I have a novice's fascination. … Continue reading On ‘Lost and Wanted’
Unreliable, Round Two
Drinking: Americano. Listening to: Rhiannon Giddens, There is No Other, then Joy Williams, Front Porch. In response to my post on Kazuo Ishiguro's unreliable narrators, my brother asked if Ishiguro's work showcases the impossibility of getting outside your own history to see your self and culture clearly. His entry point is An Artist of the … Continue reading Unreliable, Round Two
Dogs, Coffee, & Books 