The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell
I heard this book praised on the New York Time Book Review podcast and I’d never read anything by William Maxwell so I thought I would start with this one. The prose is supple and elegant, the characters memorable and well-delineated but the story is…
Domestic Work by Natasha Trethewey
I was assigned this poetry collection for a course but I found it well worth reading. My course is focused on collections of poetry; what makes a collection, how do poems in a collection speak to one another and how do they add up (or…
Industry Unbound by Ari Ezra Waldman
This book is focused on why data privacy laws and compliance is so ineffective and enabled in this effort by technology companies and the privacy folks charged with protecting people’s personal data. As someone who works in the trenches of data protection, I mostly agree…
Sontag by Benjamin Mosser
I read and listened to this book at the same time. Originally I was going to just listen to it but almost immediately I realized more attention was required. It took me a long time to get through the more than 700pp. this way but…
The Best American Poetry 1993 edited by Louise Gluck
As a poetry autodidact, I am doing a variety of things to learn the craft and service my inspiration. One of them is simply to read random good poetry. To that end I checked out this book from the library. What a treat! Not only…
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
I saw this paperback in Target and after reading the awe-inspiring ‘Kindred,’ I snapped it up and so glad I did. This vision of the 2020s written the 1990s is unfortunately a bit close for comfort. Things are worse in the book than our reality…
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
I recommend reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet before tackling this novel. Not to understand any plot points but to live in the state of grief that pervades the play. Grief is center stage in Hamnet which is the story told mostly from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife,…
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare is so big that for this edition of Hamlet, ‘Arden Shakespeare’ which provided the modernized texts of his plays, Shakespeare’s first name isn’t provided anywhere on the cover of this volume. The irony to me is that one of Shakespeare’s achievements is how much…
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