"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
It’s El Tour de Tucson day and we’re housebound, at least until all but the stragglers pedal past our neighborhood. The only way out requires crossing the tour route, which’ll be blocked to car traffic for a while yet. The stragglers, who’ll be about 25 miles into their 100+ mile route as they pass our street, would probably welcome being run over, but I’m not […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news. YCRT! Banned Book News Local pastors petitioned to have LGBTQ-themed books removed from a Banned Books Week display at the public library in Rumford, Maine. The library, backed by patrons and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, stood its ground. Per […]
My book review posts don’t normally have a theme. They are what they are: reviews of the latest books I’ve read, fiction, nonfiction, thrillers, whatever. This time, though, I include three books I’ve had on the to-read shelf for years … more than a decade in one case … that I finally got around to […]
“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 […]