I took a couple of deep breaths
thought about the acceleration of days
yes
I could reenter them but...
No
how could I desert that whole other life

One husband chewed the bindings off his wife‘s feet.

...yet as far as drugs went, books weren‘t so bad...

The white daisies dabbed the field so profusely that it seemed to foam.

(Right before Granier proposes to Gladys)

All fences must be straight.

Come important, leave important. Leave a bag of diamonds for all I care. Kill em and leave, Rev. WHATEVER YOU DO AVOID THE EXECRABLE MOVIE “GET ON UP”. Read this book, rather.

Screenwriting, indie-film legend writes a ripping yarn. This one is about Castro Cuba and is by turns picaresque, lyrical and violent. This maybe-not-classic-but-memorable novel really sailed, for me, on boats.

42, never married, never divorced.

Karen Silkwood reads a Nora (Eff-rin) classic. Interspersed with easy recipes.

Better than anything Junot Díaz ever wrote. Looking forward to Time of Butterflies.

“He put the thing in reverse, engaging also a certain mechanism of the mind by which he found it possible to pretend that he couldn‘t by any means have got himself stuck in a rut miles and miles from any human place and at the same time to spin the tires and rock the car and whip the steering from side to side, installing the jeep permanently right where it was.”

Not his best. Some of the dialogue left me cold. But slowly you realize it is a downbeat, peculiar portrait of mental illness. On to Train Dreams!

Good men are hard to find. Mediocre ones abound. Our author meets three in her life and gives up. But it‘s Joe who is the prize jerk. His arrogance is breath-taking. Aside from that this moving memoir will make you hug your “Ma”.

Own the paperback outright but the audio book is read by a veritable murderers row:
Nick Offerman
Mike Shannon
Dermot Mulroney
Will Patton
Liev Schreiber.

Written by maybe the greatest sportswriter of our time, the baseball aspect kept me going. But the queasy parts have not aged well.

“The prayers we pray then don‘t count, surely?”

“What kind of woman could savage a man with 150,000 volts, then turn around and talk theology with thin-tied visitors come to make known the wonder of Jehovah‘s love?”

“Funny how much I missed her, until we were under one roof again, and then I missed myself.”

An elegiac meditation on outliving her adopted daughter. Sought out the poem “Domination of Black” by Wallace Stevens because of it.