This year I started teaching a class of Seniors. It had long been a goal, and now I got to do it. I wanted to create as much of a collegiate simulacrum as I could. So I brewed up some lectures and led each week of instruction, discussion and reflection around a prominent theme in literature generally–with specific attention paid to African-American experiences (slightly awkward for a transparently white guy to do for a class full of black kids). And to guide my lecture creation […]
Kid Stuff (Reviews #1-3)
I’m never sure if anyone reads my reviews here or not, but I figure, just in case someone does, I’m sorry that I’ve been so long without posting this year (something about teaching in 2014 sucked up all my energies) I thought I’d kick off with some of my first books from the year–a collection of picture books that ended up in a lot of conversations around the Caldecott Medal–my full break down and ballot can be read at my personal blog. With that, here […]
A Love triangle tale of neurotic mind vigilantes
Justine suffers from near-incapacitating hypochondriac whose mother died from a rare disease everyone refused to believe she had. Damn good reason to have health anxieties, I say. She struggles through each day as if it’s her last in case that elusive vein will explode in her brain. But living on edge is almost too much for her hunky, yet simple-minded boyfriend, Cubby. That is until she meets Packard, a mysterious Turkish restaurant owner, who says he can save her hypochondriac self-implosion. Justine (and myself!) is skeptical to say the […]
Strong Start, Weak Finish
If not for the humor in the exposition of her epistolary novel, I’d have never read, much less bought Maria Semple’s bestseller, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012). A satire of the Seattle-based super rich and privileged, I found myself not liking many of the characters because they typified so many of my stereotypes of the super rich: delusional, entitled, competitive, paranoid, and money/power/status obsessed. Despite my less than positive review, the novel is well-written and stylistically inventive. For these reasons, it gets three rather than two stars. Read […]