A Friend of the Family is narrated by Pete, a successful internist, living in a well-to-do suburb in New Jersey for over twenty years. At the opening of the novel he is awaiting the result of a lawsuit for medical malpractice and being physically threatened by his patient’s brother as he passes time at a beach. For some reason, he is living in the studio above the garage, separated from his wife and son, marking time with his elderly mother and very few patients. What […]
Bleak and more Bleak
One of the reasons I won’t hit my goal of books this year is the collection of short stories: Dear Life by Alice Munro which I read six months ago. The writing is terrific, and yet, the stark reality of these stories put me in a funk. Most of us live insignificant lives, the small details, the dramas, don’t add up to much in the end. Munro’s characters don’t learn lessons, their stories simply reminding us how small life is. Leaving Maverly is set in […]
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
As I read Great Expectations a lot of questions popped up for me. Do people struggle through some of this old language like I am doing? Is this book still relevant, or is it a quaint morality tale belonging to 19th century England? What was Dicken’s own stance on class? And, was Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayal of Miss Haversham over the top? (I haven’t seen the film adaptation, a friend described her performance as contained). I actually had a heavily annotated edition of the book, […]
Would you lease your house to this species?
There are a lot of things going wrong in the world, but it is difficult to downplay the ecological crises we are currently witnessing. Repeated studies have been published describing a loss of biodiversity happening at a rate never seen before. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History describes the extinctions that are occurring around us in the context of five major extinctions in Earth’s history. Unlike so many books about environmental crises, Kolbert stays even-keeled, with a journalist’s approach to describing what, why, […]