Category: Winter Reading 2018

My neighbor Dave told me about this book and asked me to pick it up if I found it anywhere. I found it online for 1$. I do not use Amazon like regular people and will only buy from sellers — used books is 99% of my use of Amazon. I love it because this

The image on the cover of Don DeLillo’s book, Zero K, makes me think of Greek or Roman statuary, the idealized human form.  In the world of Zero K, people (wealthy people, to be sure, or test subjects) go to a highly-secretive private facility to go through a “process” during which they die, but have

Admittedly, I got lost these past few weeks in the never-ending storm of school. One of those time when lifting my head to breath felt like I was wasting precious time. Okay, that’s potentially an exaggeration. I have, however, not read one page of anything that wasn’t a textbook or a journal article for the

Last week we had our monthly reading group at the gallery. This time instead of having a lengthy read, we did a “close read” of Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild”. This was my first time reading Octavia Butler and I’m not typically one to read Sci-Fi. This story, however, as one of the discussion groups

Just thought I’d share a poem written by Hettie Jones, which appears in the book I’ve been reading:  Women of the Beat Generation.  Hettie, who was born in 1934, “made a choice to leave behind comfortable Long Island and the fifties’ ideal of a cookie-cutter marriage when she went to a women’s college…explored the creative

This is an incredibly important book.  I have actually been waiting for it to come out for months.  I was about a week away from it’s release in print, and could not wait, so I ordered it on my Kindle. As a person who suffers from a certain level of toxic stress, I have always

When I posted my pages read to my spreadsheet today, I was surprised to see that I had broken the 2,018 page mark.  I hadn’t been watching the “Total” column.  The audiobooks have made all the difference. I’ve picked up ‘Women of the Beat Generation’ again and am liking it better, now that I’m into

Another book not in my original stack to read.  I came across yet another recommendation to read it, so I thought it was time. “Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light.  And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green.  But why don’t

Nine stories, 215 pages, on 5 CD’s.  Don DeLillo wrote these stories over the course of 4 decades, so there is no story thread connecting them, which I didn’t know going in but quickly figured out.  The first story, “Creation,” took a turn that was so abrupt that I twice backed up to an earlier

This is a 548-page novel which was unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008.  I could have a go at writing about it from several different angles, but I think it may be most interesting to address the publication of such a work.  I felt a bit queasy about reading something