From the category archives:

Read

Reading aloud in Advent time

December 10, 2011

I’ve been silent for weeks here, finishing NaNoWriMo (52K, baby!) and then, guess what, having so much fun on the current novel that it’s all I want to work on in those wee dark morning moments I secrete away for my creative delight. And by the way, I wasn’t having much fun for the first [...]

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Alienated in America…

November 13, 2011

I’ve said before what eternally satisfying reading can be found in the several compilations of Paris Review interviews. Bathroom books that never grow dull. Philip Roth was interviewed in 1984—the interview appears in The Paris Review Interviews, IV—but something in his words resonates today. Whether you agree with him or not, this is one beautifully-written, [...]

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Pish, Posh, Said Hieronymous Bosch; Nancy Willard & The Dillons, 1992

October 31, 2011

It’s time to start thinking about holiday gifts (if you’re not one of those people who did it all in July). For the children on your list, you can never go wrong with books. Most kids don’t have enough, and those few who do, who are tripping over piles of them in their bedroom—well, hopefully [...]

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On the way home (two delightful books for kids)

September 29, 2011

Flew from Portland to Portland with no sleep. I paused in Newark in between and saw all my pals from my first pass through—it was Saturday morning again—the 15-year-old Arab-American girl who told me why jobs in the airport are the best around, the nice guy who’d taken my photo with Betty Boop the week [...]

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Let the Great World Spin; Colum McCann, 2009

September 11, 2011

The tragedy of 9/11 is not the loss of the Twin Towers, but of the people who died that day, there and in Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Towers, though, are a symbol of the various and myriad losses at and subsequent to that moment. After 9/11 people remembered Phillipe Petit and his walk between the [...]

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Algeria: Of Dreams and Assassins; Malika Mokeddem, 1995

August 20, 2011

My childhood and adolescence would have been a hellish and unending imprisonment without the marvelous complicity of this language that I read in [i.e., French]…. For me, the desire to write is very old; it dates from adolescence…. For me, writing is an existential need. For a woman it is the best means of affirming [...]

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Albania: The Accident; Ismail Kadare, 2008

August 19, 2011

Oh summer. Reading goes on, late at night, tucked into a day away, early in the morning, but between comings and goings, writing grants and writing lists, baking birthday cakes, organizing kids’ complex summer schedules, and all the rest that pours abundantly down upon us in the mad, brief abundant season of New England summer, [...]

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Peru: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; Mario Vargas Llosa, 1977

June 4, 2011

Once again, of late, the quantity of books on the property has far exceeded the available shelf space, a dreadful and recurring problem. The books with no home make their way to the floor of my studio, spilling out in an ever-rising sea of books. Probably best to avoid flood metaphors in difficult times such [...]

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Read Around the World, cont.

June 2, 2011

Geez, I just typed in all the countries in the world, more or less; that is, recognized by the UN or by a whole bunch of countries, according to Wikipedia, or recognized by me for obvious literary reasons (Palestine).
Daunting.
Daunting, at any rate, to imagine finding literature from so many island nations, including the ones I’ve [...]

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Afganistan: The Kite Runner; Khaled Hosseini, 2003

May 29, 2011

I see already, here at the starting line, that the Read Around the World project will mean I am sometimes writing about books I don’t admire wholeheartedly or recommend unreservedly. This goes against my policy here of only writing about what I love, only praising. Life is short, and I know how long it takes [...]

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