I have been reading a lot of books lately about clearing out the clutter of one’s home (and mind), for an easier life. A friend suggested I might want to check out The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin, so I gave it a try. I can’t say that there was anything new or startling in its pages, but it was a quick, mostly […]
This Star Won’t Go Out
It’s difficult to think critically about a book like This Star Won’t Go Out, because it was clearly put together with lots of love by the grieving friends and family of a charming, precocious, and kind sixteen-year-old girl who died from complications with thyroid cancer. So instead I’ll try to give you an idea what it’s like. The book revolves around Ester Earl, who was about as lovely as any fictional book heroine you could imagine. She was funny, thoughtful, self-depricating, creative, kind, friendly, uncomplaining, […]
Cool, Calm & Contentious by Merrill Markoe
Overall, kind of meh about this one. Parts of Merrill Markoe’s memoir, Cool, Calm and Contentious, were very, very funny. The bits with her dogs, in particular, had me chuckling. l. She discusses all of the things that she allows her dogs to do — wake her up at the crack of dawn to eat, hog every inch of the bed — and asks us to imagine a human being exhibiting similar behavior. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book wasn’t very good. I did enjoy […]
The Invention of Sensationalism
“What class the murder was, what class the victim was, how the death occurred, all these things made a great deal of difference to public interest,” writes Judith Flanders. She’s referencing Victorian England, but she may as well be talking about the U.S. in the twenty-first century (and England and many other places, no doubt). A full century before the term “missing white woman syndrome” was coined, so much about justice in Victorian England resonates with frightening similarity to our own time and place. First […]
A book easy enough for your dog to understand, but maybe not you.
I’m a bit of a closet physics fan. It’s hard to admit, seeing as the classes I struggled with most in college were my physics courses. But if you don’t force me to work out equations for things like how a ball bounces, and just talk to me about all the weird stuff that physics predicts, I’m an enthusiastic student. While there are a lot of mysteries to be understood in this world, there is one thing that really bothers me. I don’t get relativity. […]
The Harm in Asking
I read Sara Barron’s previous memoir, People are Unappealing, and don’t remember much about it but when I saw this is my “recommended reads” on Amazon I figured I would give her a try. In The Harm in Asking Sara Barron focuses on “everyday life,” pulling from her childhood up to present day with varied results. The first section of the book isn’t great, there are a lot of bowel movement references… Once Sara begins fixating on whether or not she could be come a […]