Last Book I Loved
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The Last Book I Loved: White Noise
In the mid-1980s, I fled Ronald Reagan’s America for the jungles of Costa Rica. Before leaving–forever, I thought–I shipped two boxes of paperbacks to the tropics. I would soon read every book from those boxes plus anything else I could…
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The Last Book (of Poems) I Loved: Coeur de Lion
Ariana Reines’ Coeur De Lion makes me want to drink and have sex. Not frilly drinks but hard strong liquor, and not just any sex, but the stuff of human explosions.
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Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
I’ve been told that it’s harder to make friends once you are an adult because in order to be close to someone you have to be vulnerable. I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to…
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The Last Book I Loved: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
It’s not easy to explain David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially to a co-worker or a parent, or your wife or your wife’s friend. First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief…
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Patrick Pineyro: The Last Book I Loved, Ulysses
The moment when a new book is begun it is a moment that vibrates, as potential energy (a writer’s wisdom distilled into a completed work, printed, bound, placed in your hands), converted slowly into kinetic energy (second by second, minute…
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The Last Book I Loved: Hygiene and the Assassin
I enjoyed this almost in the way one would enjoy a parable cut out of a much larger, didactic, philosophical novel.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Poem at the New Year” by John Ashbery
To truly commit a poem to memory is to commit your life to that poem. Out of all the many verses I’ve memorized over the last year, no other has so fully enveloped my days than John Ashbery’s “Poem at…
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Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Was there ever a place greyer, wetter or lonelier than Paris in the fall? For an Irish person, that’s a weighty question to consider. I guess that in some other incarnation of myself I might have found the glistening cobblestones…
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Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
One of the first things that became apparent while reading Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins was a gentle spiraling, a contracting of the scope of the novel, from the streets of Bulawayo to the small village of Kezi via the…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
Having been an English teacher with an undergrad degree in Journalism, one might think I read a lot of quality work, but I don’t. I read news and posts that probably take less time to write than it does for…
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The Last Book I Loved: The All of It
Have you ever read a book about a sensational event that isn’t sensational itself? That manages to transcend the shocking element to reveal a much more interesting and nuanced story, which then helps you begin to comprehend, even if not…
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The Last Book I Loved: Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond
I read Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond in a hotel room. Nowhere fancy: I was in Asheville, North Carolina, facing nothing more uncomfortable than bugs and frogs and humidity, the steady chatter of fat people plunking…