reading notes

by Sherman Alexie
ISBN: 9780316013680
I read Alexie’s short story collection The Toughest Indian in the World a few years ago and really liked it. Then I read Flight, a novel that should not have worked, but was nevertheless brilliant. So when I heard Alexie had won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, I was [...]

by Tao Nyeu
ISBN: 9780803733282
This children’s book should not, like most so-called children’s books, be considered a valuable book only for children.
Who among us could not use some magic seeds, flying monkeys, and fantastic sea creatures? Who wouldn’t want to be tucked in by a wondrous friendly white bear? I suppose some wouldn’t. You boring folks [...]

Pictures from Previous Lives
published Winter 2002
I have a stack of old issues of Granta, most of which I have not read, but which I very much intend to read someday. Doesn’t every real reader have stacks of someday books in the house? For this particular issue, someday finally arrived a week or so ago.
It makes [...]

An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk
ISBN: 9780307275837
I enjoy the conceit of a novel not being a novel but being something else: a true story or oral history or alternate history or some combination of those elements. When it works (as with World War Z) it’s brilliant.
This novel (which isn’t really a novel) is [...]

by Maira Kalman
ISBN: 9781594201349
I was fascinated with the unexpected heaviness of this book as an object, and by the style of illustration – handwritten with bright colors and not polished (as in not antiseptic, not as in unfinished) – so of course I needed to bring it home when I found it at The Strand.
I [...]

by Brian Andreas
ISBN: 0964266024
This is the third collection of story-sketches from Andreas. (I read at liked a previous volume, Mostly True.) Whimsy and knowingess seem to be Brian Andreas’s thing: many of his stories – fragments, really – manage to deliver both even though they are less than a page long. “Open Heart” is characteristic [...]

by David Bayles and Ted Orland
ISBN: 0961454733
This book can be reliably found in used bookstores throughout Cambridge and Boston, so I’ve looked at it for years. Looking at it on the shelf always made me feel like a wannabe — I wasn’t a real artist, so I had no business reading the book.
I could [...]

by Lawrence Weschler
ISBN: 9781932416862
I wrote a blog post not too long after I finished reading this book pulling together examples of connections I had noticed as a result of reading it. That’s probably the best evidence I can offer that the book is worth reading: it will lodge itself in your brain and affect how [...]