Category: Reading

I read Oryx and Crake when it came out ten years ago, and The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. I’ve read The Road and Children of Men and The Dog Stars and, more recently, Station Eleven, plus a couple other books and movies (Do The Cloud Atlas and The Years Of Rice And Salt…

February 3 You Lost Me There Eh. This got bogged down, I thought—Alzheimer’s researcher guy loses his wife in a car accident and writes a lot of grants in the lab and has sex with a student half his age and he doesn’t really love her and his best friend’s daughter comes to stay with…

February 1 2010 Birthday Stories edited by Haruki Murakami This is a set of stories all about, yes, birthdays. They’re all stories in English that were translated into Japanese, but re-issued again in English. I thought this was a pretty good way to organize an anthology, especially because Haruki decided to write little musing English-teacher…

I ‘m having a hard time focusing lately so I have not been able to read very much this past month. I’m sure that will only continue to be the case for the crazy coming month of July, the month that we cannot mention in my house without clutching our pearls and closing our eyes…

May 5, 2006 Explorer’s House: National Geographic and the World It Made by Robert M. Poole I saw this in the bookstore and was pretty intrigued by it, enough to put it on my hold list, at least. I had no idea that Alexander Graham Bell was at all involved with National Geographic, also known…

April 2, 2006 The Highest Tide Based on the facts that this book involves the discovery of an Archeteuthis squid, is set on the Puget Sound, and was read by me in just one day, you’d think I’d really liked it, right? You would be wrong. There’s nothing really bad going on here, but really,…

March 5, 2006 Wickett’s Remedy by Myla Goldberg I’ve been interested in reading this for a while, as I Ioved Bee Season very much. Gael, as usual, came through for me and I polished it off with much relish. The historical perspectives came off as authentic to my ear and I was interested to know…

February 1, 2006 Buying A Fishing Rod For My Grandfather by Gao Xingjian Another mystery hold list book, I had a hard time getting into it, and it’s so short that by the time I was sort of in, I was out again. If that makes sense, which it totally doesn’t, but that’s okay because…

January 3, 2006 \\The Awakening and Selected Stories\\ by Kate Chopin I’ve read this many times before and picked it off the shelves while I was waiting in the living room to get picked up for my second New Year’s Eve party. The novella is cinematic to me: I can really see the path down…

I read one hundred and eleven books this year, according to my very sophisticated calculations, which don’t include magazines (although I wanted to count the \\New Yorker’s\\ fiction issue for this month, I didn’t, because a magazine is not a book and I think I should try to uphold some sort of standards) or guidebooks…

**November 2, 2005** \\The Devil’s Teeth:A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks\\ by Susan Casey I would have liked this a lot better if it had been more about badass great white sharks and less about the author, the author’s need for freedom, the author’s disdain for authority, the author’s…

October 7, 2005 How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez A good story, with multiple perspectives and a good use of backward chronology so that you get more details as you read and stuff you learned about in the first couple of chapters makes more sense and takes on more meaning as…

Well, I’ve reached a new low, folks, with only five books read this month. I still have two I cannot seem to get through under my bedside table, which are absolutely driving me mad. This is all I got this time. Man. Five. Five! September 5, 2005 Monkey Food: The Complete I Was 7 in…

July 1, 2005 Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi Mrs. Roboto lent me this when we went to Skate King. It’s a very quick read (I started and finished it on the same bus ride) about the sex lives of a group of Iranian women. I really like the drawing style and the whole thing was very…

June 6, 2005 That Distant Land by Wendell Berry This is a set of dense stories about a fictional town in Kentucky called Port William, spanning from 1908 to 1986. They chart the slow change and eventual loss of the farm lifestyle…and more importantly (and devastatingly, according to several of the characters), “country” values…in such…

I notice as the months go by I am reading fewer and fewer books! Sadness! I never used to notice the amount of reading I did…it always seemed pretty steady to me. I’m not keeping track this year for guilt reasons, I keep telling myself I’m not being \\graded\\ or anything…but I guess I’m competitive.…

I notice as the months go by I am reading fewer and fewer books! Sadness! I never used to notice the amount of reading I did…it always seemed pretty steady to me. I’m not keeping track this year for guilt reasons, I keep telling myself I’m not being graded or anything…but I guess I’m competitive.…

March 2, 2005 Dreaming In Cuban by Cristina Garcia This had rather a hypnotizing effect on me in terms of the language and the pace of the book. Also it mentioned my hometown at one point and made me miss dreamy tropical-ness. Most of what little I know about Cuba is filtered through the experiences…

Well, I am sorry to report I didn’t read much during February. Is it because people keep asking me to go out and have fun with them, thereby cutting in to my valuable reading time? Is it because I insisted this month on reading a lot of non-fiction, historically not my strong suit? I do…

January 1, 2005 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer A book of short stories I received from my mom for Christmas. I liked the voice very much even though a couple of the stories seemed very similar to one another; they weren’t connected but they seemed to have the same cast of characters with different…

We had book club last night at my house. Right on schedule, about half an hour before anyone came over I decided I wanted to just turn off all the lights and lock the door and hoped people wouldn’t show. I feel like that on the rare occasions when I actually do have people over,…

Are you wondering what I read, watched and listened to this past week? Yes? Well, okay. I aim to please. I read Brick Lane on the planes to and from JournalCon and enjoyed it very much, thank you. I brought a back up but between sleeping, knitting, and talking with Mandy in the airport for…

I was reading Dwanollah’s excellent piece on Sweet Valley High for some reason, as one does on a warm August day in the office that one feels should more rightly be spent outside in the hammock with a tall glass of frosty lemonade and a stack of YA books. I mean, y’all, Sweet Valley High.…

First things first: If you read journals, you may have already heard the terrible news about lovely and talented Allison and her husband Chris’s losing all their stuff (and their dog Murphy) in a fire in their apartment. There’s a site up that will allow you to make a donation or to get something off…

Sometimes you don’t have a lot to say, and so you write a short entry about what you’re reading, what you just read, what you’re re-reading, and what you might like to read in the future. No one minds, right? A History of God by Karen Armstrong. I think this is actually overdue at the…