The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The first adult novel I ever read was by Agatha Christie when I took a plane across country at the age of twelve. I don’t remember the title but it was definitely a Hercule Poirot mystery and I was hooked. For some reason though, I…
How We Live is How We Die by Pema Chodron
About twenty years ago a friend gave me, ‘When Things Fall Apart,’ my first book by Ms. Chodron and I was hooked. If I had to summarize that book and all of Chodron’s life wisdom in one phrase it would be to lean into what…
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
This was a surprising bestseller almost ten years ago. It has been on my list ever since then and I finally got around to reading it. Piketty takes a Darwinian approach to evidence collection. By this I mean he is scrupulous both on the source…
Marcel Duchamp, The Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tomkins
This slight volume takes less than an hour to read but my Duchamp obsession knows no bounds so I snatched it up greedily. The interviewer Calvin Tomkins wrote the definitive biography on Duchamp and it is definitely worth reading. There are obvious gems here but…
The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly
My friend wanted to read this thriller together and I couldn’t find a hardcopy so I sadly settled for an Apple Book. I stopped reading e-books years ago and this experience reminded me why. To me, an e-book isn’t a book. A book is the…
Collected Poems: 1 by Muriel Spark
I am a Muriel Spark devotee. I bought her entire set of novels when they were recently reprinted for her 100th birthday. When I saw this volume of her poetry at a dank and dusty San Luis Obispo bookstore, I couldn’t resist purchasing it. I…
The Mersey Sound, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten
I found this book through an odd source. After reading the amazing ‘Savage Detectives’ by Roberto Bolano I decided to rifle through the book and research the name checks primarily of other poets and many of them who wrote in Spanish and aren’t translated into…
Call of the Great Spirit by Bobby Lake-Thom
I read this book to learn more about Native American spirituality and I definitely got that from it. As a book it felt amateurish; the writing weak, repetitive and somewhat impersonal despite it being a life story. Yet despite all that, it has great sincerity,…
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