Open to words, forever–
I’ve just come back from a weekend retreat during which I read absolutely zero pages. It was an interesting experience to be away from words–at least written ones, although breakfast was a silent meal every day, so no talking either–even though I stuffed my backpack with three books that I did not even look at.
Look what showed up in my mailbox! Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, from borkali and the book swap, arrived the day almost two feet of snow fell, so it took me another day to be able to hike out to the mailbox to get it. I had wanted
Here’s my pile. It’s a fairly random pile, since I could have pulled a number of books that have been orbiting my reading space for a while now (“read me! “no, read me!”) and have had a completely different assortment, but I thought that starting somewhere might be a better strategy for me. Seeing what
Well, almost. Eight out of ten. Taking two weeks off from reading is probably not the best strategy for reading ten books in ten weeks, but I still had a great time trying. And I realize that I ended up in a very different place from where I began. Certainly the books that I finished
David Leite’s memoir, Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression recounts his growing up in a family of Azores immigrants in Fall River, Massachusetts (what he jokingly calls the “armpit”of the state), and the challenges he faced in accepting himself as a gay man suffering from manic depression. There is
Elizabeth Willis’ poetry is alive with lyric intensity and personal engagement. Alive is a collection of works spanning more than twenty years, and the density of her language and thought makes these poems beautiful in their difficulty. A poem needs to reflect “the internal struggle” we have with language, Willis has remarked. “When you travel
I’ve been back from an epic family trip in Europe for a week now, and the mountains of laundry are done, the suitcases have been put away, the empty fridge has been filled, the dog and cat are happy to be back to their comfortable beds, and the fog of jet lag has finally lifted enough
What a magnificent book Oliver Sacks’ On The Move is, and how fitting that after almost four hundred pages about his life and his writing, Sacks ends in the present tense. We can almost trick ourselves that he is still alive, still writing, still absorbed in all his far-ranging explorations of how the mind works
It is extraordinarily depressing to realize that the world of 2017 is not that much farther removed from the still-segregated world of the late 1940’s and ’50’s that James Baldwin writes about in his essay collection, Notes of a Native Son. Racism is an ingrained fact of life in our America, just as it was
I’m in the middle of a memoir project this summer, and much of my reading list consists of autobiographical nonfiction, works that I feel I need to read in order to understand how the memoir functions within the limits of language and memory. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory was an excellent place to start, although now I
Seasonal Reading 