Among the goals of my summer non-genre reading list was covering works that many people read in high school or college that have slipped past me. A top entry on the list was The Catcher in the Rye, that canonical volume for high school novel classes everywhere. Mentioning this to some good friends while I …
Category Archives: Books
Books: Love Medicine
Yet another recommendation came to me from my good friend Nate. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich is a story about family, about Native American life on the reservation, about accepting those aspects of life we can’t change and shouldering on through. The book is structured more as a series interconnected of short stories rather than …
Books: Ballistics
Ballistics by Billy Collins qualifies so far as the greatest departure from my normal reading. It’s a poetry book. And I enjoyed it. Weird… I haven’t read any poetry since high school except the odd scrap in fantasy anthologies, and a couple by the esteemed Neil Gaiman. I think poetry has always baffled me. Most …
Books: All the Pretty Horses
From my good friend Nate, I got a recommendation to read All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. I’ve had intentions to read The Road by McCarthy, but I was only passingly aware of his prior work. Since The Road was 1) post-apocalyptic and 2) already on my list, I decided to give Nate’s suggestion …
Books: The Circumnavigators
With this summer’s plan to read books outside my normal lists, I’ve decided to occasionally post some thoughts about what I’m reading as well. Per the advice of the excellent Justine Larbalestier, I’ll only be writing the nice things–there’s just no upside in ripping something I didn’t happen to enjoy. On that note, the first …
The Non-Genre Summer Spectacular!
I love science fiction and fantasy. I grew up reading them, and they still have a lock on my attention and taste. There’s nothing better than digging into a book that creates a world unlike our own. Not to say that’s all I read, but at times the genre dominates my reading list a bit …
The Art and Science of Organizing Bookshelves
With our recent home improvements, I’ve gotten a chance to take on one my favorite organizational task–reorganizing my bookshelves. Although I dearly love my books, I only change how they’re ordered in a big way when we’re moving the shelves so they end up unloaded. I believe a person’s bookshelves tell a lot about them. …
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Books: Cat’s Cradle
This the third of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut’s books that I’ve read. The first I read was the one he’s best known for, Slaughterhouse-Five, and the second was Galápagos, which my friend Brian got me started on reading aloud on a road-trip along the Oregon coast. Most people know about Slaughterhouse-Five if they’re familiar …
Books: Giants in the Earth
Inspired by my good friend Nate, I’m planning on blogging more about what I’m reading. Kicking that off is a book that I read earlier in the year, meant to write about, but didn’t actually get to at the time. Better late than never! The book is Giants in the Earth, by Ole Edvart Rolvaag. …
Review: My Name Is Asher Lev
My sister-in-law loaned us My Name Is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. It came with several other books, and she didn’t say much about it other than to suggest that we read it. My wife read it first, and I watched her devour it in the course of a couple days. Afterward, she had a …