GRAB. THE. TISSUES. It’s of my opinion the best art (comedy included) comes from a place of honesty and vulnerability. Tig Notaro is a wonderfully deadpan comedian. While she was already a steady working comedian, gradually climbing the ranks of fame, her career skyrocketed almost over night after a historic set where she bravely walked
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
This week I finished reading both Denis Johnson’s book of poetry (which I had started Week 1) as well as Notorious RBG, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I think as we iterate, I am getting better at my selections. I find myself saying, well maybe yes– I “should” read that, but I don’t feel
I finished this sweet little book in a day. Truth be told, I had a different week 3 book, but it is a slow- go, and I am really trying to keep up and on track this time around- so I decided to slip this little red book into the midst. And I am so
I loved this book. The kind of love where I would do anything to distract myself for a few minutes in order to just not finish reading it. Make a cup of tea. Straighten up the coffee table. Move my shoes from the living room to their appropriate place by the front door…. All just
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
On the evening of July 4th, I flew back from Chicago to Sacramento after a wonderful visit. I had mentioned in my last post that I had finished my book en route to Chicago and was in need of something for the way back. It is rare for me to find anything worth reading at
So I totally bit off of borkali’s reading list and decided to listen to the audio version of The Notorious RBG… The book is chock full of personal and political triumphs and setbacks all woven together. It kind of skipped back and forth in the timeline, so you have to keep up with that. Not
So, I brought three books with me on my vacation. I read snippets of my Thoreau book, I read pages of my novel, Beautiful Ruins (which I am loving by the way), but the book that I completed and re-read several times was a book of poems by Elizabeth Willis, called Address. Right off the
It took me a little longer than I had expected to finish Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, mostly because I needed to slow down my reading to really experience the full impact of Nabokov’s language. Reading this book is like bathing in words. Nabokov writes in such a richly detailed way (how
Seasonal Reading 