I have this thing with doors. I find doors tricky, especially the automated and revolving kind. I live close to a mall with a small set of revolving doors, slowly they go round and round and you’re walking up the doors adjusting your walking speed according to the perceived speed of the current revolving of said doors. Then just as you reach the doors, they speed up making it so that I must always sort of jump into the revolution as if it were a […]
A prayer of thanks for sweet, fast reads.
A Book of Uncommon Prayer is a fast and sweet read. Each section follows the format of “A prayer for…” “A prayer of gratitude for…” “A prayer of bemused appreciation for…” all for very mundane, everyday stuff. Cashiers (may their customers be pleasant and their feet not hurt), newts, summer beaches. It’s charming to the point of twee, but there are worse things to be in the world and at 192 pages (many of them half pages), it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I would absolutely […]
Quick, and Fun, Like Riding a Bike (Not a Bronco)
Half Broke Horses is a “true-life” novel, meaning that Walls took all the stories she had heard and collected about her grandmother and wove them into a narrative, smoothing them into place in a coherent timeline. Since the novel is written in the first person, she admits to assuming her grandmother’s thoughts and exact words, and it’s probably best to just treat the whole thing as probable fiction – beyond that, though, many of the stories kind of defy belief! From learning to fly a […]
A Colorblind Society is an Unjust Society
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and law professor at The Ohio State University. Alexander first encountered the idea of a racial caste system when she saw a poster stapled to a telephone pole declaring that “The Drug War is the new Jim Crow.” At the time she thought it was hyperbole. After working in the criminal justice system for several years, her thinking had evolved from the system has a problem with racial bias to believing that mass incarceration is a “well-disguised system […]