Last Book I Loved
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The Last Book of Poetry I Loved: L.A. Liminal
The week I decided to move to Los Angeles, I read a book of poetry by a woman who had lived there for four years, hated it, left it for New York, and couldn’t stop writing poems about it. It…
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Priyanka Ghosh: The Last Book I Loved, Kartography
I am on a reading spree off and on and a lot of it depending on the state of my mind and my love affairs. If I am happy and in love I don’t read as much as I would…
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Hannah Kingsley-Ma: The Last Book I Loved, The Great Gatsby
Lately, I’ve found myself in that kind of frenetic stage of higher education where I feel compelled to read all the books I’ve been told deeply matter. I figure reading the chosen few masterpieces is one of those requisite steps…
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Cortney Phillips: The Last Book I Loved, Property
I didn’t just love Valerie Martin’s Property—I devoured it, thought about it for weeks, forced it upon every single one of my reading friends, and even initiated a brief correspondence with the writer because I just had to talk about…
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Mena Reynolds: The Last Book I Loved, Making Toast
Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt is a lovely memoir written by a prestigious author / journalist / columnist about how, following the death of his daughter, he and his wife Ginny move in to help their son-in-law raise their three…
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Roxane Gay: The Last Book I Loved, This Is Not Your City
When I was a kid, I loved participating in my school’s science fair each year even though I did not necessarily have any aptitude for the scientific. My experiments were never that inspiring but I certainly thought they were—volcanoes erupting…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away” by Matthea Harvey
Matthea Harvey’s “The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away” resides in her second full-length collection, the wonderfully-titled Sad Little Breathing Machine. It is a poem about ponies, sadness, and the inversion of cognitive behavioral therapy. It is a poem about…
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Robert Stubblefield: The Last Book I Loved, Cash
You can never know too much about Johnny Cash, one of the few icons who stands up to repeated listenings, readings, late-night and early morning considerations. You come home from a bad night out, a great night out, sort through…
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Heather Davidson: The Last Book I Loved, The Broom of the System
I was always better at stories than at real life. Books are a religion I have found to be more lasting than any church-based one. You must read David Foster Wallace, my friend and fellow believer said, like I was…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
It is not often that a book brings me to tears, but this book had me weeping into my pillow for much longer than is considered appropriate. This novel by Junot Diaz is just what the title suggests: the story…
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The Last Book I Loved: Reality Hunger
Despite what some might see as a fuming belligerence that characterizes our age (tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sheen, etc.), I think we’re hampered by a cultural tendency to be overly polite, especially when it comes to the arts. Go…
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Matthew Weinkam: The Last Book I Loved, About a Mountain
I often worry about over-hyping books. Nothing ruins a good novel or collection of stories quite as well as a glowing review. So when Nick Flynn calls John D’Agata’s latest book of creative nonfiction, About A Mountain, “utterly amazing” and…