So Much to Read

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”—Samuel Johnson

Book Reviews
Literary Limericks
Six-Word Summaries
Buy-Nothing Songs

3 February 2013
The Middlesteins
Jami Attenberg
Food is always on hand in this novel about Edie Middlestein and her family. Attenberg is fair to her characters, never making a stereotype out of the aging single daughter, the high-strung sister-in-law, or Edie herself, successful lawyer, weight reduction surgery candidate, retiree, divorcee, and not especially likable woman. The only discernable plot is the preparation for Edie's twin grandchildren becoming b'nai mitzvah. Like any good meal, it's easy to gobble up, comfortably filling with a bit of an unfamiliar spice here and there.

3 February 2013
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
Jonathan Evison
I couldn't get into the author's highly praised recent novel West of Here, but this one grabbed me from the start. A father escaping a tragedy gets a job as a caregiver for a teenaged boy in a wheelchair who has his own father issues. The disabled boy is a fully realized character, not just a catalyst for the main character's development. The book reminded me a little of After the Workshop, with a hapless protagonist trying to find a little adventure in a cheerless life.

<—2012 reviews

“There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breathgiving air…I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby