Last Book I Loved
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The Last Book I Loved: The Glass Castle
The problem with reading a modern memoir is that often they suck. The influx of reality shows and confessional writing (ahem, Tori Spelling) has placed an emphasis on story and less on literary craft. This is why when I read…
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The Last Book I Loved: Runaway
I came late to the Alice Munro party but now that I’m here I’m planted and staying. This book floored me—the first story, yes, good, interesting, intriguing, but it was story #2, “Chance” that handled storytelling and character and mystery…
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The Last Book I Loved: Microcosms
The book I’m reading now, Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’m traveling in China while falling in love with a book about the tiny and strange borderlands between Croatia (Istria) and Italy. Microcosms may not be as good as Danube, Magris’…
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The Last Book I Loved: In A Lonely Place
The book I am reading and loving right now is In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. I have known and loved the Humphrey Bogart movie based on the novel for a long time. The movie is about a…
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The Last Book I Loved: Away
I fall in love with books all the time. I remember periods of my life this way – like “what’s-his-name left me when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway” or “I got my first bra during the winter when I read…
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The Last Book I Loved: Rodinsky’s Room
In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later, was filled with curious artifacts, including a street atlas of…
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The Last Book I Loved: Stop-Time
A few times over a life, you find a book that inspires a physical kind of love: you can’t be far from it, stroke it absently for reassurance, take it to bed at night—slip it under your pillow or shove…
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The Last Book I Loved: Atmospheric Disturbances
Galchen keeps us wound tight with anxiety, desperately waiting for some ray of hope for a man with a badly damaged mind and heart.
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The Last Book I Loved: The Centaur
I read The Centaur by John Updike out of funereal obligation, and had given up on it twice before, but this time put my misgivings to rest and plowed through what is surely the most tender evocation of father-son affection…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Wordy Shipmates
I fall in love pretty easily, so for me right now it’s Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, which is her take on John Winthrop, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson of Puritan ancestry fame. I love it because Vowell’s feelings toward…
