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These are the books I read this year. Six thousand nine hundred and sixty one pages of bookish goodness, in order of recommendation (within each category)…
Fiction:
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
City [...]
“I’m not the dancing kind,” I said. “You’ve always known that.”
“You danced at our wedding,” she answered immediately. “You were fine. You did that little shuffle thing with your feet.”
“She looked stricken; and I suppose, since I am now fully aware, thanks to our figuratively speaking marriage counselor, that the steamboat of marriage must be [...]
I’ve been too busy reading to write recently. The New York Public Library system is so absolutely fantastic that it delivers an endless stream of books for me to read. The problem is… they have due dates. So there’s actually some time pressure to get through them.
If you don’t take advantage of [...]
Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar was on the Daily Show this week promoting his book “Happier” – a book about positive psychology. Given that my psychology recently seems to suffer from a lack of positive, I was thinking of spending some of my newly earned over-minimum-wage dollars to procure it. My concern, though, [...]
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something [...]
A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all
over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are [...]
Went to see I Was Tom Cruise on Monday evening. Funny little play about an average Joe who meets Tom Cruise and things get crazy. The play itself was decent, but really it was the spot-on Tom Cruise portrayal that made the show. I mean, the hair, the mannerisms, the voice – [...]
Faced with the task of deciding which books to keep (and move) and which books to leave behind, I decided I’d start a catalog of sorts. LibraryThing is a cool resource and really I just love looking at my catalog as a graphical shelf. Hot.
Sometimes I’m amazed by people’s talent. While I think there are plenty of things that I do well, I’m not sure there’s anything that I’m amazingly good at. I think my talent-envy is mostly confined to artistically oriented persons. I’m jealous of their creativity. And of their ability to see those [...]
My top 5 favorite nonfiction books:
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts by Daniel Wegner
Controlling Human Heredity by Diane Paul