Category: Books & Learning

A spare, quick read, outlining the tale of Odysseus’ Penelope from her own point of view, and his execution of twelve of her maids (which seems quite brutal from our modern perspective) upon his return from his voyages. Atwood’s retelling pieces together scattered bits from various classical sources to build a more complete picture of [...]

Take this one slowly. It’s a whole world of information. I read one chapter at a time, diagramming out the poetic forms, trying to decode meter. Learning a ferocious amount. This is a great springboard from which I hope to bounce into learning more about the specific poets and ages of poetry. Each section describes [...]

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible… by A. J. Jacobs A.J. Jacobs and I are not that different. Secular, self-deprecating, Internet-bound, Wikipedia-obsessed, urban, relatively young, literary and with an approach of forced cleverness. Yup. That’s kind of me, too. But for all this familiarity [...]

Last night, I was sitting with a group of friends (full disclosure: watching Lost) and there was some wine. Also good cheese and a cornucopia of rice crackers–like four years’ supply of the little cheesy kind–but that’s a story for another day. Somehow the topic of “grimmest book ever” came up. Sean asserted that the [...]

From the NYT: A 30,000-Volume Window on the World By ALBERTO MANGUEL Published: May 15, 2008 The author of “The Library at Night” writes about finding a place to keep his library of some 30,000 books. – This is pretty much my dream. 30,000 books? 15th-century stone presbytery in France? Oh, hells yes.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible… by A. J. Jacobs A.J. Jacobs and I are not that different. Secular, self-deprecating, Internet-bound, Wikipedia-obsessed, urban, relatively young, literary and with an approach of forced cleverness. Yup. That’s kind of me, too. But for all this familiarity [...]

Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt I wasn’t completely swept off my feet by this much-loved Irish autobiography, but I had an enjoyable engagement with it. McCourt’s grim take on his childhood poverty in Depression- and WWII-era Limerick is simultaneously depressing and bemusing. Characters are fairly allegorical, though not without surprising complexity. Priests are [...]

I received another Early Reviewer book this month from LibraryThing. The paperback edition of Sarah’s Key will come out this fall. It is currently available in hardback from Amazon and other sources. – Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay In 1942, thousands of Jewish children, women, and men were herded into a stadium in Paris–the [...]

Some folks have been digging through LibraryThing books, looking at books that most often get tagged “unread,” indicating, duh, that they haven’t been read. Sadly, my system of tagging uses “TBR” (to be read) instead of “unread”, so my tags aren’t included in this collection. The top 106 most unread books are the meme. Why [...]

So Brave, Young and Handsome: A Novel by Leif Enger Enger’s second novel gracefully tells a very American tale of identify and redemption, uncoiling with an almost Homeric, profound cadence, but in the end telling us less than I’d like. Sometimes what you look for in a book are the slight edges of imperfection. Sometimes [...]