I wasn’t planning on making this my week of impressive, but painful, tragic books but here we are. Reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is like watching 12 Years a Slave—both are extremely important, but neither are entertaining or enjoyable. They're too real for that. Cora is a slave who decides to escape from the brutal Georgia plantation that is the only home ... Read More...
It’s Not You, It’s Me: Mini-Reviews
I haven’t had a great year of reading (until recently), but generally it felt pretty clear that it was the books not working, not me. Except for these two recent reads, which is why they’re It’s Not You, It’s Me books. In both cases, the writing and story were good, but they were missing whatever indefinable element I need to keep me invested. Given the title, it ... Read More...
October Reading Wrap-Up
Goodbye, October! This was another one of those months where, when I looked up it was the 20th and I had no idea where the days went. Is that an age thing? Because I never used to notice it so much. Anyway, I didn’t read as many books in October, for two reasons. One, I’m continuing to pay less attention to new releases (which is kind of working, in part because I’m only ... Read More...
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
Summer is generally a time when I enjoy lighter books, those that don't take up too much brain space. Sometimes, though, it’s also lovely to disengage from all the activity, find a shaded space and give yourself up to gorgeous prose and stories with meaning. Miss Jane, one of my favorite novels from 2016 is out in paperback this week and fits the bill for this kind of reading. ... Read More...
How to Survive a Summer
Will Dillard’s film studies dissertation is making his life miserable because he can’t seem to finish it. In fact, finishing anything after the summer he spent at Camp Levi when he was fifteen, has been difficult. Now, a movie, based on a memoir about the camp has come out and whatever semblance of motivation and forward motion there was in Will comes to a complete ... Read More...
The Shore: A Novel by Sara Taylor
The Shore by Sara Taylor may qualify as one of the most unusually formatted books I’ve read in a long time. Take a family tree composed of over fifty members, stretching from the 1850s to 2143. Close your eyes, throw a dart at the tree and wherever it land--that’s a chapter. So, even though Medora Slater is the matriarch who gets this clan started, she doesn’t make an ... Read More...
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