Category: Books & Learning

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1757)… by Benjamin Franklin Required reading, I suppose, for those of us trying to grasp the mindset of the founders of the United States. Franklin’s free-wheeling book flits from topic to topic, now an account of his early apprentice printing days, now a lengthy diatribe on the back-and-forth of a [...]

My stepmother Christie gave me a blank handmade leather-bound journal sometime in early 2001, or perhaps somewhat earlier–I can’t quite pin down the occasion. Since September, 2001, I have used it as a reading journal. Sometimes all it is is a list of books I read. Sometimes it’s much more. It meets several long-lived journal [...]

05_book_corrected Originally uploaded by lyzadanger Tomorrow (Saturday), I’m volunteering at the semi-annual Friends of the Multnomah County Library used book sale. The spring sale is in Gresham (hmmm) but if it’s anything like the fall sale (yay!) it’s going to be amazing. Last fall’s sale netted me $320 of books for $35. Or something like [...]

Benjamin Franklin: reading his autobiography Poetic form. Reading the Norton Anthology on this, learning about villanelles, sestinas, etc. Trying to understand why I like Walt Whitman so much. Re-reading Leaves of Grass. Trying to grow a sense of rhythm from nothing. Latin. I’d like to be able to stumble through sections of The Aeneid later [...]

In the Woods by Tana French There were passages in this book that left me holding my breath in a wondrous way. Paragraphs that seemed to snatch exactly how I feel out of the literary air. About the small joys of life found in ugly little things (like stuttering fluorescent fixtures and dandruff) and the [...]

lyzadanger posted a photo:

My library unfurled in a way that is technically impossible. But I wanted an image that suggested what it was like to be in the room, which this does fairly well.

Julius Caesar (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare Forgive me that it took me eight months to finish Shakespeare’s shortest play. I kept picking it up, reading the first act, and then forgetting. It’s strange reading about Roman history through compound filters: dramatization, Shakespearean England, what we know of the Roman Republic, modern norms. One [...]

The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates This is the fourth Oates novel I’ve read that deals directly with themes of domestic violence, battered or slighted women, and bigotry (the others being “The Falls”, “Blonde” and “The Tattooed Girl”). Oates’ dark currency is in these bleak subjects, and through inherent talent and simple prolificness she [...]

I just finished reading my pre-release copy of Joseph Persico’s new biography on FDR for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. I decided to put a bit more effort into the review this time–it took me over an hour to write it! I actually took copious notes while reading, something I haven’t done in some time. Franklin and [...]

Seems like the entire grim (but wonderful) corpus of Cormac McCarthy has recently been swept into movie lately (“No Country for Old Men”, the forthcoming version of “The Road”). Looks like it doesn’t stop there. I stumbled across this preview of a screen adaptation of Jose Saramago’s Blindness: an epic, grueling work by a Nobel-prize-winning [...]