I was lucky enough to win an ARC of The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber from Goodreads, and I really mean it when I say I was lucky to win that giveaway. The Velveteen Daughter is a lovely, charming book. It’s well-written and gives a wonderful sense of time and place. It’s easily the best book I’ve read all year and one of my favorites ever. It’s not actually released until July 11th, but I highly recommend getting it as soon as it’s available. […]
Stunning photo project or exploitation?
The premise of The Oxford Project is simple, and I suspect it’s one that you’ll either get or really not get. In 1984, Peter Feldstein photographed every resident of Oxford, Iowa (I can’t recall if he ended up photographing every single resident, but if not it was extremely close). The photographs are simple and stark, with people rarely posing but just standing frankly in front of the camera. Sometimes they’re accompanied by a bicycle, a baby, a gun, a lion. In 2004, he went back […]
Ladies Who Paint
When I first started reading The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith, I was pretty sure I didn’t like it. The first chapter felt like it was about dissatisfied rich people and I was not in the mood for that nonsense. Happily, it is not about dissatisfied rich people, nor is it about the theft and forgery of a Dutch painting, which is what I thought it was about after I decided it wasn’t about rich people. Really though, it’s about three […]
Do good work and share it with people.
A few pages into this book, I thought that it was really not for me. If I’m being perfectly honest, I only continued because it was a fast read and I’m several weeks behind on my Cannonball. It’s a book about creativity, and making things, and getting off your ass and actually doing it, and finding inspiration, and living a healthy life instead of just being a creative who drinks and stays up all night. I ran into some weird identity stuff here. I couldn’t […]