"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."—Samuel Johnson
Reviews | Limericks | Six Words | Buy Nothing |
16 July 2024
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Camille Bordas
This is the novel I wanted Romantic Comedy to be! It's about the students and instructors in an MFA comedy program, the proving ground for standup comics finding their footing. Is it because Bordas is French that she isn't paralyzed by the terror of expressing an unacceptable opinion, which puts a stranglehold on humor and art? Bordas is writing in English, and aside from a couple awkward turns of phrase you would never know it's her second language. I wouldn't say it's funny (Romantic Comedy, about SNL writers, wasn't funny at all, and anyway neither is SNL 95% of the time) but it doesn't have to be. Bordas does quite a bit of musing about comedy, and writing, but it's also about guns, fame, families, aging, the Holocaust, and awkward conversations in the car. If the characters' voices are a bit indistinguishable, that's easy to forgive. They're all in the same business, which is, as one of them says, "finishing people's horrible thoughts so they didn't have to go there themselves."
23 June 2024
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Adam Higginbotham
One of the pleasures of aging is that you can read about a time period now studied as part of history that you also experienced firsthand and remember well. Higginbotham's book about the ill-fated space shuttle mission of 1986 is both meticulously researched and narratively compelling. The shuttle held a crew of remarkable people, like Ron McNair, who as a doctoral student carried all his research around in a duffle bag (it was the seventies, there was no cloud storage), which was stolen, so he was faced with recreating years of experiments in a few months. Which he did. There aren’t any secrets uncovered in this book, but probably only those who paid close attention know the details that have come out in the intervening years. Most of us assumed, and were encouraged to believe, that when the vehicle blew up the astronauts and passengers all disappeared instantly, barely knowing what hit them. That's probably not what happened, sadly. Higginbotham lets us get to know each person on the mission, as well as other major figures in the space program’s history, like Sally Ride. And like Barbara Morgan, who was the runner-up to be the first teacher in space, who I would think would have gone from bitter disappointment to enormous relief in an instant, grateful to be left behind on earth, but who then turned around and became an astronaut herself. He also covers the history of tragic failures in the space program, most attributable to humans sacrificing care and caution and ignoring warning signs in order to save face and impress the public. His previous book was about Chernobyl.
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Phyllis B. Olson
Set in 1930s Arkansas, this novel is a family story told from the viewpoint of the matriarch, Phoebe, who is 29 years old (!). It’s an unassuming novel that’s wholesome without being sentimental, a matter-of-fact portrait of a leaner time, but not a simpler one. There are a few quite harrowing scenes, as accidents and deadly infectious diseases were part of life, just as were pushy neighbors who will take advantage of you if given a chance. But the dialogue gives life to the characters, and the story is leavened with humorous moments, such as childhood misheard words, and plenty of colorful details like feed sack dresses, black walnut cake, and a coconut as an exotic Christmas treat. It reminded me of a book I enjoyed as a child, set a generation earlier, Jeanette Gilge’s Never Miss a Sunset. It’s a window to a time now almost a century in the past, a way of life shadowed and about to be altered by World War II, and that still shapes the American imagination.
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Monica Potts
Another view of the lives of women in rural Arkansas is found in Potts's book, part memoir and part reportage. Potts escaped the limited horizon of her 1980s childhood in the Ozarks, went to Bryn Mawr and became a political journalist, but her best friend Darci was never able to break free. When Potts returns to her hometown to live, she finds her friend is a single mother addicted to drugs and struggling to stay housed. Potts's thesis is that the dynamics that ensnare people in poverty hit girls the hardest, but I found her case less than convincing. But that's beside the point; our focus should be on breaking these cycles of despair for both girls and boys.
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"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
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Copyright © 1996–2024 So Much to Read
Contact: books at so much to read dot com