By Reid Meadows I like to keep up with the news, but it seems as though the debt crisis in Europe sort of snuck up on us. We had been so focused on pulling ourselves out of the muck of the previous financial crisis here in the United States when suddenly, Greece turned into a [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal As in the Coldplay song currently cycling over KFOG’s radiowaves, paradise is usually a state of mind. But there’s a whole history of those who have taken the idea more literally, and Brook Wilensky-Lanford has provided a highly entertaining compendium of quests to locate this ideal in Paradise Lust:  Searching for [...]

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By Jean Farrington Oliver Sacks is no stranger to regular readers of The New Yorker, and over the years, I have eagerly devoured each new account of strange and bizarre human behavior.  In his most recent book, The Mind’s Eye, Sacks focuses on afflictions and conditions related to sight and communication, but particularly those that [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Since I skipped Susan Sontag‘s introduction to Epitaph of a Small Winner  I did not learn ahead of reading this 1881 novel that the Brazilian author was mulatto and from a humble background, and I would never have guessed it. The apres-mortem voice of Machado de Assis’ novel (originally titled The [...]

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By Byron Spooner I read Martin Cruz Smith’s Wolves Eat Dogs (2006) on the recommendation of my friend Maketa.  She described it as “dark,” and she was right.  The book is dark as the inside of a car battery from beginning to end. I enhanced the midnight tone by reading it while the Japanese reactor [...]

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By Suzanne Kleid “I am thirty-one years old and never had any formal library training. I have had a different kind of training which is quite compatible with the running of this library. I have an understanding of people and I love what I am doing.”—Richard Brautigan, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 It’s a [...]

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By Rennie Ament Recently, I have not been reading Atlas Shrugged. I sometimes flip it open and scan a sentence, but mostly the jacket just gets eyeballed.  It’s a stellar cover-there’s an art deco aesthetic combined with a metaphor that even a fetus could understand. Somewhere in San Francisco, a white guy has this illustration [...]

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By Byron Spooner If a friend tries to hand you a copy of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet run immediately in the other direction, preferably not carrying the book with you since that would only weigh you down and hinder your escape. After you stop, hopefully at a safe distance, call and arrange [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan Sometimes I ask myself-what happened to me? I used to be this crazy, tattooed, pizza all the time, motorcycle-riding bad ass.  Now I spend my nights debating which kind of yoga to go to (vinyasa or bikram?), cooking healthy dinners, reading and playing piano. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I [...]

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By Byron Spooner I’m reading Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown; 2010).  My wife gave it to me on Valentine’s Day.  I’m about halfway through and, so far, it’s the best novel I’ve read in months–and one of the weirdest in both in language and subject matter.  Room is the story of a [...]

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