I read compulsively.
I cannot help it.
Nor do I want to.
I am also impatient.
Bookmarks do me no good.
Like Raymond Carver, I wake up most mornings with the terrible urge to remain abed all day and read.
Just Finished Reading:
Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou
Growing Like a Weed by Lynn Johnston
Confessions of a Carb Queen by Susan Blech
Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
Silent but Deadly by Mark Tatulli
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Cane by Jean Toomer
Most of the books on my shelf are pleasure reads. There are a few work-related books shelved here, but since I get paid to read and talk about books with very smart young(er) people, the line between work and pleasure is often blurred.
A word about my ratings/opinions:
***** means don’t miss it.
**** means it’s well worth reading.
*** means it’s not terrible.
** means beg or borrow if you must, but hold onto your ducats.
* means “why did were a tree and perfectly good ink wasted to print this rubbish?”
A few things that delight me: being married, onomatopoeia, hot sweet milky tea, religious icons and rosaries, sequoias, NPR, ridiculous monsters, libraries and bookstores, Christ, Guinness, sick jokes, Cary Grant, stinky cheese, shoes by John Fluevog, Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants, Caravaggio, theory out of practice, errata, rhyme and meter, silence, Maya Angelou’s voice, sushi, and a good hard belly laugh.
A few things I cannot abide: e-mail, globalization, extremism, small talk, split infinitives, people with no sense of narrative or history, tight spaces, practicing at theory, anti-intellectualism, prose masquerading as poetry, animal cruelty, Dan Brown and Nicholas Sparks, folks who disparage things they cannot do, grotty teeth, and rudeness.
I cannot abide and am delighted by Christopher Hitchens. Go figure.
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