Protective shield! Sorry!—-I feel no protective shield with you. Very often I sit down with people and I‘ll feel nothing, and I‘ll say to the person, Your protective shield—-do you think it‘s made of brick or curtain? Is it Plexiglass? Could you close your eyes and visualize taking it down, please? Once they do that, I can do the reading, because I can‘t read through the protective shield. But you don‘t have one, which means you‘re psychic your...

I feel like the sensation of this book says more about our cultural pathologies - misogyny, fear of outsiders, lingering resentment of women with careers - than it does about literary quality. This read like a standard-issue, uninspired suspense novel, and I lost interest within the first 100 pages.

Certain themes emerge - inauthenticity, disenchantment, divorce - and yet a magical dust seems to gather around Cusk‘s narrator, so that everyone reveals their most profound, biting stories in incredible detail. I would say no other novelist compares, though I think there is a quality of ancient storytellers, like the Decameron, in the fascination with human variation. And a similar feeling of dread - and of ecstatic relief when no crisis occurs.

“Why should her photograph be accurate? So that she could be identified by the police? The whole point of her profession, she said, was that it represented an escape from reality. Besides, she preferred being that sylph with the waterfall of hair. In some part of herself, she believed that was who she still was. A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.”

Who knew that a book that begins with a suicide could be so enthralling, uplifting, and transformative? McDermott‘s books summon worlds of meaning and feeling within ordinary lives - leaving you with the realization that little in this world is really ordinary.

Beautifully written, it seems created to be read in one swoop, and pondered long after. Having read some of his essays, I knew Coates to be an eloquent and vital thinker on black lives, but hadn‘t realized how perceptive he is on whiteness and its meanings, which I find myself increasingly troubled by. I am so glad to have found this, and picked it up despite the worry it wasn‘t for or about me - I could not have been more wrong about that.

If a thought can be expressed in 10 words, Brott will find a way to express it in 25, along with a quippy aside and an accompanying sidebar adding nothing. In other words: tiresome, annoying, and precious, which seem to describe his parenting style as well. Granted, it contains some useful information, if you‘re willing to wade through horrible dad-jokes, baseless speculation, and assorted drivel. Read a general pregnancy guide - not this.

I love stories that bring the past to life and give historical characters a voice - Charles Johnson‘s are full of imagination and wisdom! Especially impressed by his writing about Buddhism and philosophy, which is witty and graceful.

Great Globe and Mail interview with Otessa Moshfegh, whose new novel (dropping July 10!) is now on my list...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-ottessa-moshfegh-and-the-art-...

I haven‘t read it, probably won‘t, but I strongly recommend Anthony Lane‘s review, which was in the New Yorker magazine, June 18th - I didn‘t know book reviews could be so funny! If anyone wants me to blurb a sample, I won‘t need much encouragement. #TheNewYorker #reviews #thriller

Recommended for anyone who loves travel, journalism, and language (and wishes they could see into the past). I brought this along with me to Boulder; each chapter is a fascinating, sometimes harrowing journey.

This is our current selection for my book club, The Munrovians!

Entrancing and deeply disturbing - this is not a book about nutrition but mental illness and human extremes, from desire and obsession to family bonds. The three sections have very different arcs, but are united by captivating prose and an interior narration that‘s incredibly powerful.

There‘s a certain pleasure reading a book in science written early in Obama‘s first term, when scientific thinking seemed perhaps on the upswing - on the other hand, anti-scientism infects both the right and the left. Specter does a great job showing this, in chapters on big pharma, vaccines, organics & GMOs, supplements, genetics, and bioengineering. It‘s no wonder we‘re afraid of science - all the more reason to study and understand it.

Read it as relief from too much Trump White House news - I needed to feel hope for change again. It's aimed at young women (she says that outright late in the book) but I enjoyed it considerably. There are some great life lessons; & the last chapter, about her cat, had me sobbing in sympathy and recognition.

Revelatory - this little book channels some of the dread, uncertainty, and compulsivity of the Trump era into composure and resolve. A vital companion to every news cycle for the next several years.

After reading Outline, I pretty much knew what to expect - fascinating, varied conversations, occasionally tied together loosely by a plot. What stood out to me this time were several jolting, cathartic moments - it really takes some dark, emotional, and unexpected turns. I loved it.

Seems to occupy a world at once very specific to now and yet timeless; it also feels very true, so that even its fantastic elements are not jarring as so much as deepening into the mystery and wonder of this world we also inhabit.

Having read a few things by Lasdun, I knew unreliable narrators are his thing. I guess they are mine too - I read this novel in a blue streak, starting late last night and continuing from waking this morning. One realization: it's not just that we're all unreliable chroniclers of our own stories. It's that we're never sure where and to what extent we're being dodgy. The machinery of revelation makes for an obsessive reading experience.

"With all my papers in order, you betcha."

Kornblum sighed. "Your exit visa?" he guessed. He had heard stories of many such last-minute denials in recent weeks.

"They said I was missing a stamp. One stamp. I told them this couldn't be possible. Everything was in order. I had a checklist, prepared by the Underassistant Secretary for Exit Visas himself. I showed this checklist to them."

"But?"

"They said the requirements changed this morning."

I wasn't aware of Thomas Pierce until I read his story "Chairman Spaceman" in the #NewYorker. It was captivating, one of those #shortstories that contains multitudes, & tumbles around your mind for days if not weeks.

My book club met on Inauguration Day to discuss this book, which imagines an America where gods from the old world (leprechauns, ifrits) and the new (TV personalities) battle for the nation's worshipful attention. No spoilers - except to say that since the book's writing, Americans' collective attention seems to have settled on one vain, scarily powerful, trolling man who, much like Gaiman's gods, depends on it for sustenance. God help us all.

The cat's eyes [marbles] are my favourites. If I win a new one I wait until I'm by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat's eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They're the eyes of something that isn't known but exists anyway; like the green eye of the radio; like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet. My favourite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe.

From the New Yorker, Jan 16, 2017, by Harry Bliss #Proust #bibliophile #cartoons

Mortality was always Rakoff's great subject, perhaps, and in these essays it's distilled to its purest, archly hilarious form. My favorite was the set 'A Capacity for Wonder: Three Expeditions', to a Disney Dream Home, Hollywood, and Salt Lake City.

Then, suddenly, I feel wonder. I have achieved, finally, a face that a moustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts moustaches. A public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself, something or other, after all. #CanLit

Barnes shows real sensitivity to Shostakovich's music and source material. His memoir feels true - and speaks to the noise of our time. #HistoricalFiction #StalinistRussia #Music #fascism #Shostakovich

This book is endlessly quotable. The well-turned thought or phrase is where the real action is - plot sidles along in an occasional, offhand way. Can sometimes read almost as a series of very good tweets - but the voice of Shostakovich is impeccably imagined, and precisely composed.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.