Kid Notes
Some assorted Kid Notes that have been jotted down in recent weeks. This is totally unofficial, and I base it without knowing anything about the rest of the school, but I’m declaring my girls the Reading Champions of St. P’s. Second graders are given reading wheels during second semester they are required to complete. They contain 12 categories, with the…
April Books
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel I ended March with a disappointing semi-apocalyptic novel, Black Moon. As I was finishing it, I got the notice from the library that my hold on Station Eleven had come in. It was much better. Mandel goes to the Stephen King well to find the source of her apocalypse: a super flu that…
March Books
Three months into the year, 15 books completed. My meager math skills tell me that puts me on pace for 60 books this year. I imagine that pace will slow a bit. March was a bit of a mixed bag. A couple books I really enjoyed. A couple duds. And one re-read from way back. The Flamethrowers – Rachel Kushner…
February Books
The shortest month of the year did not slow me down at all. Five books plus one leftover from January. Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri I forgot to include this in my January list. Probably because I had a hard time thinking of what to write about it. Not that it’s a bad book. It won the freaking Pulitzer…
January Books
The Martian – Andy Weir As I mentioned in my December wrap up, this is the book I began in 2014 but finished on Jan. 1, 2015. I destroyed this book. Once I started it, it was hard to put down. In fact, I started it after midnight on Dec. 30 when I could not sleep. I went downstairs, flipped…
Purple Greatness
A combo piece this morning, taking one entry from my up-coming review of January books and combining it with the movie on which it focused. Let’s Go Crazy – Alan Light I shared the excerpt from this a few weeks back, and the book finally hit the library two weeks ago. I snatched it up and raced through it in…
December Reading List
Decembers tend to be big book months for me. December 2014 was no exception. I finished seven books and got most of the way through an eighth.[1] Thus my final total for the year was 57 books. I’m pleased with that effort. The Rise & Fall Of Great Powers – Tom Rachman I loved Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which was a…
November Books
Another busy month. Four books, three of them good, two very good. I’ve been saying this for years, but I really should write down my thoughts on each one when I finish them, rather than waiting until the end of the month. My apologies for the disjointed thoughts and fuzzy memories on a couple of these. The Facades – Eric…
October Books
A rash of baseball books read between games and even during commercial breaks. Wild Pitches – Jayson Stark Stark has been one of ESPN’s baseball ‘insiders’ and columnists for nearly two decades, and had been covering baseball nationally long before that. This is a collection of his favorite columns from his ESPN years. I should have read the back cover…
September Books
Hawkeye: My Life As A Weapon – Matt Fraction, David Aja, Javier Pulido As you know, if you follow along with these posts faithfully, I like to give graphic novels a try a couple times each year. In this case, I went with the trade paperback of a comic series I’ve heard praised in many places. Hawkeye was supposed to…