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,…
My Struggle Book 1 by Karl One Knausgaard
I am rereading the Hades section of Ulysses where Bloom and the others attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral while also reading Knausgaard’s first volume that focuses so much on him and his father. Both books dive deep into the lonely, scary, lively and disgusting nature of…
Fernando Pessoa and Co. : Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
I read a profile of Pessoa in the New Yorker a number of years ago that intrigued me. The story of Pessoa is less about the compelling nature of his poems than his creations of heteronyms; fictional poets complete with backstories with unique voices, preoccupations…
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Don Delillo had established his reputation when Underworld came out. Partly because it was so long, Underworld got treated as his attempt at the great American novel. I read it eagerly when it came out and felt let down. The characters were flat, the incidences…
The Best American Poetry 2021 edited by Tracy K. Smith
Poetry is so many things; a whiff of ancient dust, a perfectly crafted stanza, the hum of the collective consciousness. These annual collections are time capsules that reflect the feel and grit of a moment, the cry and shout of a Greek chorus. This collection…
Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life by Jacquelynn Baas
Recently an art critic for the Washington Post wrote glowingly of Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending’ that he painted in 1912. However, this critic then said it was the last thing Duchamp painted and implied that this served as the end of his career as an artist…
The Soil by F.M. Courtney and S. T. Trudgill
This is the second technical treatise I’ve read about soil. I can’t say I get more than 40% of the material but I still find the subject and what I learn fascinating. From a spiritual sense, it re-enforces the notion that all that exists in…
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