On my other blog I’ll be writing a series of articles in November on improving your memory. I’m also giving away a classic book on the subject. It’s bloody easy to win: just head over to Memory Month Contest and post a comment.
One of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, has passed away.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut had a way of showing the absurdity in history like no other.
1492. As [...]
The book discussion group that some friends and I have been keeping alive for the past few years now has a Google Group set up for questions, announcements, and general discussion. If you’re in the St. Louis area and are at all interested in getting involved in an extremely casual book discussion group, feel [...]
DailyLit is a free service that emails you small sections of a book or other piece of literature daily. Now a portion of my reading time is built right in to the time I spend checking email. Currently I’m subscribed to Poems by T.S. Eliot. I’ve had to tweak my spam filters [...]
Lauren has another book review up, this time about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel.
Sometimes over the top, sometimes overly sentimental, this story is indeed extremely loud and incredibly close. But Oskar Schell’s tenderness is almost impossibly beautiful. His navigation through a complicated, painful, young life with eyes wide open is a gentle reminder [...]
My sister, Lauren, reviews The Year of Magical Thinking.
Didion steers away from resolution, yet she is not cynical. Her writing is luminously vulnerable, though never sentimental. Religious, scientific, literary, and ultimately human, this story is simply one woman’s journey through memory on the stumbling path towards acceptance.
Woohoo! I won Free Book Friday at About Contemporary Literature.
I finished reading Dan Simmons’ Ilium this weekend. I highly recommend it for lovers of sci-fi, literature, and greek mythology. Some knowledge of The Iliad and The Tempest helps, but isn’t necessary. The manner in which Simmons retells Homer’s epic poem, develops his myriad of characters, interweaves three seemingly unrelated plots, and [...]
Continue reading about These issues lie on the laps of the gods
Stephanie posted a link to an article which sparked an interesting discussion about the value of books.
There is a lot of Truth and Beauty in books that simply does not come across as well in other media. When I watched the Lord of the Rings movies in the theatre, particularly The Two Towers and [...]
The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
The disappearance of the original Jesuit missionaries was transformed from a tragic mystery into an ugly scandal: violence, murder and prostitution, doled out in teasing, skin-crawling doses. [...]
