Dorothy West didn’t write that much fiction all told. But she was forever involved in publishing, editing, and other fields related to writing. In the mid-1990s she published her first new novel in a few decades The Wedding which won acclaim because it’s good, because Oprah took notice, and because it was her first novel in a few decades. This novel came out in the late 1940s and it shares an obvious connection to another novel from that time The Street by Ann Petry. They have some parallels. […]
I can get behind a literacy cheerleading effort
I liked this one. I listened to the audiobook (six discs) and I listened to it pretty much straight through as I walked and did my errands today. This tells the story of efforts to put books in the hands of soldiers and sailors during World War Two. Starting with a long discussion on Nazi censorship and propaganda and ending with the GI Bill, the book makes the long argument that the values fought for by the various sides: the prevailing of a singular idea […]
Somewhat United Themes
I liked this book just fine. I am trying to figure out if I will never read any more of Sarah Vowell’s books or all of them. I think my issue is that I have to imagine it’s a lot of the same. Not to say that the different subject matters don’t change, but the format is similar. I listened to the audiobook version which has the same issue. You have to love Sarah Vowell’s voice, which is fine by me, but more so you […]
Book Club part 2: Ubikonicity
God there’s nothing worse than doing something and then it messing up and having to do it again. My page refreshed for some reason and erased all the things I wrote about this book previously. It’s weird because that’s sort of what this book is about. This is the second book of my friend only book club where we’re reading his choice Ubik by Philip K Dick, which is about the vast future landscape of 1992. Remember back then when we had telepaths running amok and […]
That’s about it: I knew what I was doing-it’s really what being a professional means.
This is a perfect little novel. It’s about a recently returned Great War vet whose wife left him when he got back taking a job restoring a mural in a small North Country Vicarage. It was written in the 1970s by an older writer and so it has that nice flavor of remembering a time long past and being able to write about it in the frank, stark honest terms not always available at the time. Birkin shows up in the North during a torrential […]
It’s not always the scariest to listen while walking in the woods, but…
This collection is basically a much darker Twilight Zone marathon. Darker because it involves a lot more violence, rape, suicide, and because a lot of the “monsters” are not necessarily explicitly real, which makes them much more possible. Nightmare at 20,000 feet – The title story is the same as the episode, except instead of just being wrung out, the lead character is suicidal and so the various steps he takes might simply be an output of his desires. Dress in White Silk – I […]
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