Because season four of Friday Night Lights was broadcast on DirecTV before they began showing it on NBC, I’d already seen occasional comments in Entertainment Weekly last winter praising it: yes, some beloved characters are gone or only appear in a few episodes, but you’ll soon love these new characters,…
FreeVerse: The Walk — a poem for Rolin
(FreeVerse is hosted by Cara at Ooh…Books! Unfortunately she’s been on a blogging hiatus, but I wanted to put this one up anyway.) Back in 2006, there were three plays nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. One of them was The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by a man…
Short notes on reading, mid-July
I finally just finished my last LibraryThing Early Reviewer book, a short biography of E. M. Forster. It was quite good, and with a block of free time and in the right frame of mind, I could easily have finished it in only one or two days. Instead, it took…
What the darkness is like
After an evening of dark thoughts and strong sobbing, some questions move through the front of my mind. I definitely have too many books. If I got rid of bunches of books, would I feel liberated in some way? Could it help me to then lose bunches of weight, maybe?…
Happy Anniversary to Scout, Atticus, Harper … and Chris & Harry
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It is one of very few books that I would recommend to anyone, if they haven’t read it yet. It’s the only book that I recommend to people who don’t read very often. During…
New books, New Orleans edition
It’s too late for a blog post, but if I at least get it started now (Saturday), maybe I can finish and post it tomorrow. I got carried away by bookstores in New Orleans, and bought seven books — though in my defense, all were used books, and not necessarily…
“Every Southern belle is a Mississippi queen…”
When I was about 19 – nearly so, or just-turned 19 – I went with my roommate Janis to New York City for the first time. We drove to Connecticut, and then took a train into the city. I still remember stepping out of Grand Central Station and onto the…
What I would write if I had time, and quiet:
An essay on Lost, with a focus on the finale. Yeah, that’s the big one, if ever I might get to it. But also:a post for FreeVerse this coming Wednesday;a reading update, in which I’m stretched in at least four directions;a review of On Beauty by Zadie Smith, with nods…
Review: The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald
I received a copy of The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. Many thanks to the publisher, Seven Stories Press, and to LibraryThing, for the chance to obtain and review this book. When I found out I’d won…
Not really a review of King Dork by Frank Portman
To say this post is overdue would be quite an understatement. I started reading King Dork, a novel by Frank Portman, during the 24-Hour Read-a-Thon on April 10, and finished it the following week. It’s one of the funniest, and most fun, books I’ve read in my life. In the…