Khaled Hosseini writes as I wish I could; simple prose and natural dialogue convey his thoughtful themes and powerful stories. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a heartbreaking pleasure to read.
Perhaps most impressively, Hosseini somehow manages to teach the reader about the complex politics of Afghanistan along the way — all without exposition or blatant asides. The back-cover […]
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Staying Awake
From the February 2008 Harper’s Magazine article Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading by Ursula K. LeGuin:
In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in […]
The Joy of Text
“Ask any girl what she wants from a man, and she’ll say that beyond diamonds and morning sex, she needs to be understood. We want guys to appreciate us, to listen to us, to just fucking get it - without having to hold their hands as we explain every thought and detail.” [1] And so […]
10 Steps to Repair American Democracy
I picked up Steven Hill’s 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy on a whim. I didn’t expect much and, for the most part, I wasn’t far off. Reading it on the heels of American Creation provided an interesting perspective.
The book is off-put-tingly partisan (anti-Bush/Republican) and is lacking in historical discussion surrounding many of the issues it […]
American Creation
I bookmark (’dog-ear’) pages of books with interesting passages. And as the above picture of Joseph J. Ellis’s American Creation shows, I marked almost every other page of this great book. I simply couldn’t help myself; there was something thought-provoking and worth remembering on nearly every page. After I finished the book, I ordered Ellis’s other […]
god is not Great
Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great wouldn’t have gotten my attention if not for its subtitle, How religion poisons everything.
The subtitle’s implications worried me. If citizens believe that religion “poisons everything,” their response might be to pass laws banning religion, a position I would strongly oppose because it infringes on personal liberty. People can think and […]
The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews
David Mamet (of Glengarry, Glen Rossfame) tackles ’anti-semitism and self-hatred’ of Jews in The Wicked Son.
Since I am not Jewish, nor do I hate Jews or myself, the topic choice may seem odd. However, I loved Mamet’s dialogue in Glengarry Glen Rossand figured he might provide an interesting take on anti-semitism (as well as ’self-hatred’, which I hadn’t heard of before). Plus, I’ve been to […]
Poem: Call It Quits
Saw this in today’s Writer’s Almanac. Struck a chord amongst all the religious/poetry reading of late…
Call It Quits
If you’re not a movie mogul, rock star, or President
if you’re not a CEO sitting on a billion in the bank,
no on will answer your e-mails, phone calls or letters.
You’ll be helpless, hopeless, too old, too young,
in too […]
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
The subtitle for The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is, thankfully, “a true story.” I say thankfully because were the book not a true story I would’ve felt like I was wasting my time. The plot - a younger brother trying to reconcile his brother’s early, tragic death - is compelling … but the writing […]
No Country For Old Men
A friend of mine, after watching the movie version of No Country for Old Men, told me that the violence is so tense that when the action occasionally pauses for the Sheriff to go into a monologue, that your tendency as a watcher is to relax, to let your mind wander, to recover for the […]