Category Archives: Book and film reviews

I got this through my university inter-library loan and read it during a trip down to Los Angeles to visit with my mother.  I had no idea what it was going to be about.  It is a tri-cross between a … Continue reading →

Read this last night. Definitely a good story, once you get started you just keep going all the way to the end, and when you get to the end you immediately go back to sections of the story, the way … Continue reading →

I really liked Maureen McHugh’s “The Cost to be Wise,” and would assign to a class if I were teaching a fieldwork oriented anthropology class.  It made me think of Doomsday Book, but told from the point of view of one … Continue reading →

I confess the book lost my attention in the final third.  I felt like I had understood enough, so I skimmed.  I enjoyed reading it, even though I do not ordinarily like American family drama novels (I live it, what’s … Continue reading →

This was on many lists of best graphic novel of 2014, so I ordered it for Christmas present for Sukie.  Very disturbing, but we had an intense discussion of what it “meant” where I got to be like a middle-school … Continue reading →

I have been terrible about recording what I have been reading and watching in the last few months.  So I thought as a way to start off 2015 without that hanging over my head I could just to a one … Continue reading →

I went for a run this morning and included a podcast of Anita Desai reading ‘The Postmaster’ by Rabindranath Tagore .   A quiet, meditative reflection on empathy (or the lack thereof). Very simple, very short. The Guardian’s selection is quite … Continue reading →

This books was recommended to me by an Australian librarians from Deep Springs (thanks Alexandra).  At first it was hard to get into, but then I gradually started reading it in smaller chunks, almost like a soap opera.  It is … Continue reading →

Was it coincidence?  Yesterday morning I started to read Gene Yang’s new graphic novel, The Shadow Hero.  In the afternoon Sukie and I went to see Raina Telgemeier at The Reading Bee in San Carlos.  And there was Gene Yang … Continue reading →

Afterwards at home, long discussion about relative merits of various graphic novels.

Alexandra Williams, youth librarian in Alice Springs, Australia, recommended The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas. Definitely for a mature young adult, it is an honest and searing portrait of Australian society… well, I am about halfway through. Told from multiple points … Continue reading →

I love her essay! “WHAT WAS FISHING like in Cuba?” This is the very first question directed at Thomas McGuane, even before he has a chance to sit down or take a breath. It comes at him from an eager … Continue reading →

My friend Bill Sundstrom recommended it. Quite interesting to read. The style is different from the usual science fiction. Deeply moody and elliptical. The strange Area X the narrator finds herself in is like her “pool gone wild” that she … Continue reading →

I really liked this story, and enjoyed reading some comments over at Mookse, so I even posted, fearfully, my own comment, reproduced below.  Enjoy the story (which you can read online at Mookse). I’ve been a long time quiet Mookse … Continue reading →

Placid, indeed, was the right word. The old man considered, placidly. via Chapter I. James, Henry. 1917. The Portrait of a Lady. Vol. XI. Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction.

The Master by Colm Tóibín is a novel, based on the “real life” of the novelist Henry James, covering the years 1895-1899.  Tóibín mostly focuses on the inner life of James, as he travels between London and Italy, but mostly … Continue reading →

So a librarian at Santa Clara University gave me a treat this long holiday weekend.  In the “fiction browsing” section I discovered Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle from 1962, apparently her last published novel.  It is … Continue reading →

Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-45.  He survives.  The diary is gripping reading. He wrote practically every day and gave the pages to a trusted friend.   At the end you get all the … Continue reading →

I found this quite a good story.  Although told in a very straightforward style, with no verbal pyrotechnics, one senses early on that there is a profound ambiguity in the relationship between narrator and his distant relative Manshu.  A clever … Continue reading →

Back to light reading I guess.  Somewhere I had read this was a wonderful book. But it turned out to be a very pedestrian mystery, and I am sorry but like reading Alexander McCall Smith some of the pleasure of … Continue reading →