Category: Books & Learning

Sister Carrie (Penguin Classics) by Theodore Dreiser Reading this required diligence on my part, attention and the willingness to grasp at new conceptions of the foundations of modern American culture. I have long come to accept the current consumerist bent of the nation as something of a continuum, but in Dreiser’s novel you can see [...]

Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)… by Alberto Manguel After the strange, gasping fascination with which I read the Iliad recently, I felt like I had to know more. Like I didn’t want to forget the shape of it and the Odyssey, like I needed to understand the [...]

I just found out that Robert Fagles, brilliant translator of those great Greek epics like the version of The Iliad I read a few weeks ago, died last week of prostate cancer. He was 74. Poor guy. I hold him in the same kind of esteem I hold John Adams, David Lynch, Nabokov. From The [...]

Of course I’m taking this far too seriously, but this month I made it into LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers. I get to read a pre-release biography about FDR: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in his Life by Joseph Persico (forthcoming from Random House). As reading about FDR was on my goals for [...]

What is this story? Timeless themes tangled in archaic notions that try the patience, but then wild and rhythmic passages that would hold up against any great poet of the modern age. It’s a conundrum. At times so difficult I feared I wouldn’t be able to pound through it, at other times stealing nights away [...]

Been catching up on my reading, as you might imagine. By the way, have I ever mentioned that I have a peeve with certain “book reviews.” I absolutely hate it when a book review is not a book review but instead a synopsis. Especially when it gives away the ending. Sheesh. This following review goes [...]

Preface: I have to admit that the uppity snobby bits of my reading psyche are not quick to confess to reading this book. It’s Oprah. It’s shamelessly smutty, it’s 973 pages long and it’s set in medieval England. But still.   The Pillars of the Earth (Deluxe Edition) (Oprah’s Book Club)… by Ken Follett I [...]

I know some of you read, too. I keep talking about my books, what I read, how great of a reader I am, my favorites, books I bought: such is the self-indulgent nature of blogs (really, whaddyagonnado?). But I’d like to know if you read something you liked, too. Please? AGGHGHGH, that was so hard. [...]

These are books that I read in 2007, not books that necessarily were published in 2007. Favorite Novel: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (sorry, sort of anticlimactic, I realize.). It was also the first book I read in 2007. Favorite Non-Fiction  The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. From my review: It’s hard for me [...]

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tus… by Bill Buford It’s easy to read, full of unusual stories, unusual people and gastronomic adventure, but it makes you feel weird. You see, those chefs you worship–you watch them on the Food Network, you buy their [...]