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“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.” — Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward From the Faulkner novels I read in college to Ace Atkins’ paperback Quinn Colson thrillers today, I can’t recall a single Mississippi novel that hasn’t centered around grinding poverty, […]
The best part of physical therapy is icing down afterward. They have this pro football rig that pumps coolant through a sleeve wrapped around your leg, chilling your sore muscles and ligaments while giving you a massage, alternately squeezing and relaxing. Heavenly! Days drag between twice weekly outpatient physical therapy sessions. I do knee bending and […]
“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” — Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion I was at Sacramento State during the years Didion wrote the essays in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” By 1970, when I started grad school, her book had […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! News Another in a long line of dead white male writers whose work would make today’s college students squirm (if anyone still read him): “And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the […]
A friend sent me a link to astronaut Scott Kelly’s New York Times op-ed, “How Tom Wolfe Changed My Life.” It’s a wonderful tribute to a great writer, but if, like me, you aren’t a subscriber and are limited in how many NYT clicks you get each month, here’s the part that grabbed me, where Kelly describes […]
“Out of the blue and into the black is what they called going into a tunnel. Each one was a black echo. Nothing but death in there. But, still, they went.” —Michael Connelly, The Black Echo The Black Echo (Harry Bosch #1) by Michael Connelly In an earlier review, I commented on the differences between […]
Tell you what, planet-destroying asteroid, you can’t get here quick enough.
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. The ALA video, above, highlights student activism in the face of censorship and book-banning attempts. Here’s one activist student’s story, and it’s an inspiring one. Long as I’m throwing lists at you, here are the top 40 censored movies. Decades of […]