West with the Night
I hadn't heard of Beryl Markham until a few weeks ago, when her name showed up in an article in conjunction with Hemingway, who was apparently a fan. Her memoir,…
Salvage the Bones
Salvage the Bones is the second mythology-soaked literary account of Hurricane Katrina I've read in the last few months, which is odd, and completely unintentional, as I picked this book…
BOOM: Oil, Money, Cowboys, Strippers, and the Energy Rush That Could Change America Forever
“BOOM: Oil, Money, Cowboys, Strippers, and the Energy Rush That Could Change America Forever” is a Kindle Single written by Tony Horwitz, detailing his investigative reporting of as many aspects…
Purple Hibiscus
Purple Hibiscus is a novel in three parts, a very common and standard thing with regard to form and execution. It is a story of adolescence and a trouble family,…
Swamplandia!
So this is a book that got a lot of buzz a few years back. It took me a while to get to it. It took me a while to…
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
So this book won a shit-ton of prizes. Katherine Boo’s decision to depict strict nonfiction/reporting within a novelistic framework is ballsy as hell and hard to do, but she pulled…
If Chins Could Kill -Bruce Campbell
Don’t worry people, I’m still reading lit fic. But sometimes you just need to sit down and hear Bruce Campbell tell a bunch of stories about the ridiculous shit he’s…
Just Kids, Patti Smith
Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids is touching and well-written. The account of her life with the visual artist Robert Mapplethorpe is a glimpse into a very isolated and very culturally…
Sarah Vowell’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Given recent electoral outcomes, reading essays about American political history probably doesn’t sound particularly appealing, but I found going into This American Life regular Sarah Vowell’s back catalog to be…
Blood Meridian
I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian about a month ago, and then went back and listened to the audiobook -the Richard Poe/Recorded Books 2007 version. This was definitely a very…