I don’t know that I would have ever picked up Kate Mulgrew’s poignant and beautifully written memoir if it hadn’t been for narfna’s lovely review from late last year. Sure, I had put it on my 500 book deep to read list over on Goodreads (side note: I may have an electronic hoarding problem – send help!), but it like many other “oh that looks interesting” books would have slipped past my immediate attention. You see, I didn’t know who Captain Janeway was. My only […]
Frantic Avoidance
As a piece of art, I have to give it to Dave Eggers. AHBWOSG is carefully composed, wonderfully constructed, funny, poignant, and moving. But it’s also a pile of emotional bullshit that took me ages to read, and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough once I had inhaled the last intentionally-breakneck run-on paragraph. I have now moved on, immediately and purposefully, to “Men Explain Things to Me.” But back to the “Staggering Genius,” which is a memoir, slightly fictionalized, as Eggers explains […]
When You Don’t Have A Lot of Time Left
Last week one of my city’s neighborhoods had a huge explosion, leveling three businesses and damaging three dozen more. On Friday my husband and I went there to meet up with friends and spread some local economy love, cash-style. We wandered into a (mostly) used bookstore called Couth Buzzard (plywood still covering nearly all of the windows) and this book just jumped out at me. I ended up reading it in one day because I could not put it down. Dr. Paul Kalanithi was 36 […]
Catching Literal Flak
The Wrong Stuff is the memoirs of Truman Smith, B-17 pilot and co-pilot during WWII. He very, very honestly recounts his various misadventures during the war in an odd, rambling, sort of conversational tone full of profanity, all-caps typing, and a good sense of humor about the whole experience. Read the rest at Pop Culture Penalty Box.