Snow by John Banville
This is a beautifully written but dull book. I didn’t care about any of the characters, and the snowy landscape wasn’t particularly evocative of any specific place (and I did so want it to feel really Irish)
Get off my lawn – or, just because you *can* write something, doesn’t mean you should
Twenty years ago, I took my first online writing class. In the early weeks, students posted short stories and critiqued them as a getting-to-know-you exercise. My friend Renee was living in Boston but had grown up in Minnesota, and the other students gushed at how her prose shimmered like wheat fields in the summer sun….
Rumer godden reading week
I just finished The Thief on the Winged Horse, a book about sorcery and dolls that you don’t need me to bang on about in book report-y ways, since you can read all the glowing reviews in the usual places. I’ll just say that I find Kate Mascarenhas’s books challenging and thoughtful (she’s a psychologist…
CRT (confederate reading time), y’all
My thoughts are crowded with current events – the University of North Carolina’s decision to offer a tenured position to Nikole Hannah-Jones (the primary NYT journalist behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project) after initially demurring; the increasing misuse and weaponization of Critical Race Theory by those who are clinging so tightly to a sanitized version…
reading about dying – 2 book reviews
Why dwell on death? For a couple of years now I’ve been studyin’ about death. I’m getting older; my parents are getting older, and I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience with it – that I remember, anyway. I do believe in reincarnation, and thinking about that makes the prospect of death easier, but…
On Bingeing, On Books
In a previous life, my job was to help people get normal with food — not so much the planning and preparing of it, but how to make peace with it. How to coexist with it. How to be one of those mysterious people who can have cookies in the cupboard but forget they’re there….