I’m a proud and vocal book abandoner. If, after giving it the official John Irving try (reading 100 pages in hopes the story gets going named after Irving because A Prayer for Owen Meany takes…
Posts tagged 2010 Books
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Sometimes when I read short story collections I try to figure out what the author’s thing is. By thing I mean the big issue they address in their writing. While it’s easy to extrapolate from…
Not so much with the rocking
I love rock & roll. I adore Michael Schaub. I love to read. So last month when he listed his five favorite rock & roll novels, I tossed up some heavy metal fingers and shouted…
Tigers Eyes are not, in fact, Silver Eyes
For about 30 of my 38 years here on Earth, I’ve been convinced that I read Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume. I read a lot of Judy Blume when I was a kid. Who didn’t?…
So bad she’s good
More happens in the first fifty pages of Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky than in entire novels I’ve read this year. It’s the lightning speed of the story that makes this book so damn hard…
Literary husbandry
In my head if Mary Gaitskill’s writing and Philip Roth’s writing were to meet, have sex, and create a baby, that baby would be Gina Frangello’s writing. I choose Gaitskill because, like Frangello, she writes…