Blogroll

Booking Through Thursday: Weeding

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain? Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This […]

Once again, I’m an illiterati

Now I read, on average, at least one book a week. And it’s not like I’m reading boilerplate serializations or harlequin romances. If I look back on the authors and books I’ve read, I’m certainly not embarrassed. Yet around this time each year I once again sense my “illiterati” status.

Wednesday was the latest case […]

Book Review: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Two of Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling books are reality journalism, where she put herself in the situations she’s writing about. Thus, in 2001 she released Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a first-hand account of trying to live on the wages of low-paying jobs, such as waitress, hotel maid and Wal-Mart associate. She […]

Book Review: Public Image: Stories and Poems by Thomas A. Hauck

Short stories and poetry are deceptively difficult literary forms. On the surface, they have the allure of simplicity. After all, they don’t require the detailed arcs or subplots of a novel. Short stories also need not deal with meter or rhyme. Yet these things also make them so difficult. They require far more exactitude than […]

Weekend Edition: 10-10

Blog Headlines of the Week

UK booksellers go nuts, decide not to stock crappy book

Obama Wins Peace Prize, Wingnut Heads Explode

Blog Lines of the Week

Jon Krakauer: “Every single time I write, I ask myself what the fuck I’m doing, why the fuck am I writing.”

Bookish Linkage

Nobel Prize in Literature: German […]