Saw the 1971 film first, before immediately rifling through my bookstore‘s paperback section to find the 1961 novel. A young schoolteacher, in Australia‘s bleak western deserts, stops through the mining town of Bundanyabba for a night, on his way to Sydney. Little does he know that he will soon lose his train ticket out, as well as all of his money, dignity and sanity as he descends into a weekend of dark depravity. “Welcome to the ‘Yabba, mate!”

Was feeling like a thoroughly English gothic thriller for October. A young man is about to come into a large inheritance after the untimely passing of his cousin, when he is paid a visit by said cousin‘s beautiful Italian widow (Italian? Then she must be up to no good). Du Maurier does an excellent job swathing cousin Rachel‘s friendly visit (or is it murderous plotting??) in ambiguity.

This was dense but oh, so very good. Probably one of the best books I‘ve ever read. William James, a psychologist of the pragmatic tradition tackles religion in a series of lectures. His argument, drawing from the accounts of countless psychologists, authors, swamis, theologians, philosophers, laymen and madmen, convinces that objective seeking of the why and whereabouts of a god ring useless next to subjective religious experience.

A good intro to the Great Migration, where for the better part of the 20th century, thousands of African-Americans left the South, seeking better opportunity in the great industrial cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was brilliant of Wilkerson to veer from reliance on historical documents only and instead structure this nonfiction narrative around three interviewed persons who retell their own personal exoduses North.

What a treat! Usually I shy away from short stories and literary contemporary fiction AND poetry…yet this collection (comprised of all three genres) has completely changed my stance, as well as introduced me to an array of authors whose longer works I can‘t wait to read next. Similar to Granta, and Lapham‘s Quarterly, Freeman‘s draws together various literary talent to expound on a common theme, in this case: love, in its many, many forms.

Published in 1901, The Desert is one of the first books that wrote about, and espoused the beauties of, (you called it) the desert. Traveling through the American Southwest, and specifically the Mojave, (an experience that probably augmented his post as art advisor to industrialist Andrew Carnegie), Van Dyke points out the vivid and stark beauty of his surroundings, or what he calls “the sublimity of the waste.”

Living in San Francisco, it is almost mandated that you read this classic by SF Chronicle columnist Maupin. Rollicking, acerbic and outlandish are the only words I can come up with to describe the interlinked exploits, shenanigans and “affairettes” of the residents of 28 Barbary Lane (which is based on Macondray Lane, right above my workplace). Next up: watching the 1993 TV miniseries (Laura Linney anyone?)

I‘ve first watched the film version of this novel, and was long overdue to read the book too. Admittedly, I didn‘t like it as much as the movie (a horrible thing to say, I know) but it was still a treat to read a book about book readers and their love of books (especially if it‘s Austen, with a lot of science fiction recommendations to boot). Also, who can‘t say no to a book club that offers peach margaritas?

I love Banana Yoshimoto‘s transmutation of the (at least for me) mundane into joyful practice. I was never into cooking (let alone scrubbing a kitchen floor or sink) but I could certainly try to aspire to Yoshimoto‘s thoughtful prescription of approaching my kitchen as one would any place of peace, beauty and comfort. Her second story, “Moonlight Shadow,” is also worth the read, about young love cut short and how grief can be navigated.

A woman lives as a recluse and eccentric in rural New Zealand. Sensing her emptiness, she meets a mute child and his troubled Māori foster father. This book won a whole slew of awards upon its first publishing in the early ‘80s by a small literary feminist collective. The author‘s language is beautiful, dancing between Māori, English, poetry, and prose. Warning: there are many instances of child abuse which may make this a grim read at times.

Gloria Anzaldua is an icon: it‘s an honor to finally get to read one of her greatest works. This is for anyone who thinks that a border is just an arbitrary line: through essays and poetry in both Spanish and English (reflecting the code-switching incumbent upon all residents of the U.S./Mexican Borderlands), Anzaldua relates the forces that shape her Mexicana-Chicana-Tejana heritage, growing up in Texas‘s Rio Grande Valley.

As a beginner runner, I find Murakami‘s musings on the sensation of “running-as-necessity” perfect. For him, he uses his long distance joys as a parallel, and tool, for constructing the frame of mind he needs to write books. Simple and meditative, this book was a comfort to read, as nerves begin to mount for my first marathon.

Sometimes you read a book because you want an easy answer to something. Not what this book provides: but Ellison‘s “non-answer” is more illuminating and truly descriptive of something as complex and monolithic as America‘s attitude and treatment toward race, versus any definitive “answer.” Invisible Man is one Black man‘s search for identity in mid-20th century Harlem and the Deep South - a narrative true to today and far from being outmoded.

James Cain‘s stories are always fun to read - mini book-bound film noirs, usually about a man who knows better, but falls anyway for that sexy married woman with murderous intentions. It hardly ever turns out well for the man. “Mildred Pierce” had to be my favorite though - more novella than short story, it veered in a different direction than most of Cain‘s plots. About to watch the 1945 film version next, starring a mesmerizing Joan Crawford.

Written in 1942 during the German occupation of Denmark, Danish writer Dinesen (a nom de plume for Baroness Karen Blixen) weaves beautifully rich tapestries that are her short stories, believing in the power of myth, romance and medieval fable as bulwarks against the bleak “wintry” landscape of WWII. Great contrast with my “summery” reading spot: Standish-Hickey State Park along the beautiful Eel River.

Long and dense but if you‘re willing to give yourself over to the pace of the novel and you can overlook long-winded conversations - this book is very good. A young German man, in the turmoil of a Europe approaching the eve of WWI, visits his ailing cousin up at a TB sanatorium in the heights of the Alps. His visit is set for three weeks but he remains up on “the magic mountain” for seven years.

Mi primer libro en español! Budista y profesor de ética y religión, David Loy identifica el sentido del "yo" como destructivo en el sentido de que hay una otra mitad necesaria de la cual comprendemos algo que siempre falta. Así lo llenamos de dinero, sexo, guerra y karma.

Some forewarning: I‘ve become addicted to running. To the point where I‘ve only competed in a 10K (great finisher‘s medal!), but Ive already registered for the San Francisco Marathon in July and am even pondering ultras. So no surprise that I love this book. A journalist gets to participate in a foot race hosted by an isolated tribe of the most gifted ultra runners on the planet; it‘s the book‘s aim to unpack how and why, and drags you in with it.

This book of short stories is slim - but it took me a month to mentally scale the lofty (but beautiful) prose, dense with philosophy, history and theology. Borges is a master of magical realism (perhaps veering closer to fantasy and esoterica): his stories are riveting imaginings concerning the impermanence of time, the symbolic nature of labyrinths, the ambiguity of authorship, as well as how eternity may manifest on a human scale.

I love the author‘s focus on her minor characters most, which gives this Korean family‘s saga (from the early 1900s Japanese colonial period of a once undivided Korea to modern day Osaka/Tokyo/Yokohama) a broad, sweeping quality, but the side-stories dead-end, which is frustrating. I appreciate this peek into the Korean-Japanese experience and how the tides of one woman‘s shame, her survival, discrimination, and globalization mold a family.

I clearly remember being assigned Morrison‘s novel “Song of Solomon” in 8th grade English: I couldn‘t recall the story now but I can recall the feelings of nostalgia, beauty, contemplation the book drew from me (which is hard to do in a 14 year old)! This book of essays has not replicated that (I think Morrison is a better fiction writer than essayist) but it still doesn‘t take away from the pleasure of, in a way, “being in her company.”

A behemoth of fine journalistic writing. Shilts was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle when AIDS first began to ravage the city. The disease soon shone a spotlight on the stunning health disparities in the US as the federal government, scientific and public health institutions as well as blood banks refused to initially take seriously what they condescended as “the gay virus.” Shilts later succumbed to AIDS, seven years after publishing.

Content-wise, I felt this was more of a review for me, given that I had started my meanderings into cosmology/physics with Brian Greene‘s “The Elegant Universe.” But it‘s not lacking in star appeal (no pun intended)…I‘m a huge fan of Stephen Hawking, RIP. I‘d recommend this short book to anyone wanting their black holes, neutrinos and particle colliders put in introductory lay terms, from a famed theoretical physicist with a sense of humor.

An entire psychotherapy session, published in 1951, between George Devereux (founding father of ethnopsychiatry) and Jimmy Picard, a Blackfoot Indian. Meeting Picard, a WWII veteran, at Winters VA Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, and using his dreaming as a tool for inner exploration, Devereux is a proponent of the full incorporation, in psychoanalytic practice, of a patient's cultural background, if one's goal is to return "the patient to himself."

A comedic and deeply heart-felt narrative of a Parsee family and its many internal familial dramas, played out in the commercial and cosmopolitan gem that is Lahore, amidst the British empire‘s slackening grip on an India beginning to whisper independence. That‘s the rest of my 2023 books, Happy New Year everyone!

Started off well: a woman with a hormonal disorder encounters, from birth, the discomfitures of being too big in a town too small and narrow-minded. She turns to a forgotten quilt, sewn by a distant ancestor accused of “witchy” healing powers, to change things.

Perhaps Im first entering into Wilde‘s works at an odd time, reading his famous prison prose De Profundis, written at the nadir of his career, before encountering any of the dramatic works that first made him a literary giant. But Im happy to get to know an older, more subdued Wilde who writes w/ humility but also (I think) no apology, acknowledging any past vices only so that they are swept aside to accommodate his spiritual awakening.

A highly interesting read (at least for one who did her physiology project on Tummo and hangs with people who write their theses on free divers diving by the Golden Gate Bridge) and one with immediate real-life applications and permanent, life-changing benefits. Nestor surveys how mouth-breathing can be killing us and nose-breathing can save us, what wonders breath-holds and box-breathing can do for asthma, sleep apnea and nasal congestion, etc.

A socialite leaves her bright urban life in 1950s Mexico City to check on her newly-wed cousin, who has sent an ominous message regarding her husband and his family‘s rotting (and haunted?) mansion she is sequestered in, off in the mountainous countryside. A good effort to infuse the Gothic novel with new blood, but the book still misses its mark.

My first book by Thompson, dubbed by a critic as the “Dimestore Dostoyevsky.” And very fitting too: this paperback reads like a Central Texan “Crime and Punishment” where deputy sheriff Lou Ford is our killer, and an incredibly psychopathic one at that. As narrator, Ford lets us wade through the swamp of his dark psyche as he struggles to keep up innocent appearances in his small hometown, recently the scene of several coldblooded murders…

Even if the style and writing of this nonfiction book is so-so, the story behind it is gripping. Grann investigates the Osage Indian Murders at their height in 1920s northern Oklahoma, where the Osage have become the rich owners of mineral rights in a land that has just struck an oil boom. Human vultures soon come to prey upon this new wealth, introducing an onslaught of corruption and killing gone unpunished due to their victims being non-white.

Written by a brilliant children‘s book author, scholar, history professor and Connecticut sheepherder, this concise, eloquent lecture of a book was meant to instill values in high schoolers that would steer them toward writing succinctly, testing fluidly, learning avidly and thinking well. But as the popularity of this work attests to, adults who read Armstrong are all the better equipped too, in facing life‘s demands after academia.

A rich historical portrait of a dying Sicilian aristocracy, hastened by Garibaldi‘s armies sweeping through Italy in the name of national unification. di Lampedusa writes of the dazzling luxuriance of the Salina family and its patriarch, the Prince (based on di Lampedusa‘s own great-grandfather) who is all too aware of the impending forces of change, relegating him and his class to the dusty corners of history. Burt Lancaster; 1963 film version.

A Jon Kabat-Zinn book from 1994. Not that that should be seen as any sign of outdated-ness: I‘ve been meditating for a while now and sometimes you can lose track of the “why” ~> this book, full of tips/tricks for looking at the everyday as anything but mundane, puts the “mindful” back into my mindfulness meditation. Watch “Healing and the Mind,” an old TV series that spotlights his breathing classes for patients w/ chronic pain = really inspiring.

For anyone toddling into beginning philosophy, this book is pure enlightenment. Took me months to get through this, but what a pleasurable few months it was! You‘re chewing over and rereading each page, from the Presocratics to Continental Philosophy, a selection of the most eminent Western thinkers (emphasis on “Western”). Adding my own revered philosopher here to the mix, background record “My Philosophy” by Boogie Down Productions (KRS-ONE).

A richly polished and moving portrait, written without one speck of superfluous sentimentality. We follow Mr. Mohun Biswas, from his humble birth to a humble death on the island of mid-20th century Trinidad, as he moves amongst a vast myriad of houses, all occupied by an equally vast and comic cast of characters, seeking a house of his own. Background record: “Hits of the Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band: Trinidadian Reggae Style Music” (1973).

In an attempt to ford the loneliness of wanting an otherwise occupied lover and missing her young son away on a camping trip, divorcee Ellen embarks on a retreat to coastal France in search of sun, sex and other forms of self-obliterating hedonism in the high heat of late summer. As many “wicked” books often end, tragedy strikes.

A historian‘s selection of photographs, taken of the small town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin and its inhabitants between the years of 1885 and 1900. Lesy pairs the photos with articles taken from the town newspaper, chronicling countless accounts of the eerie, dismal and shocking. This is a photo essay/compendium that shows the malaise of rural America entering modernity, a book garnering a cult-like following ever since its 1973 publication.

Read this in time for the release of Christopher Nolan‘s movie “Oppenheimer.” As far as non-fiction graphic books are concerned, “Trinity” is grimly excellent: portraying the science, history, war-time politics and immense moral quandary behind the construction of a weapon that has ushered us into the Atomic Age. Background record “Loving Explosion” is by The Eliminators, a 1970s funk-soul band from the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina.

A dark ode to the powerful bonds of sisterhood. Practical Korede must look out for her baby sister Ayoola, a spoiled beauty who attracts many men, only to end up killing them when she loses interest. Complicating things further, Ayoola soon catches the interest of Korede‘s crush: a handsome Lagos doctor. A fun setting for some sibling rivalry; otherwise, the breezy plot doesn‘t bite very deep. Poolside w/ coffee from Naked Lounge in Sacramento!

Poet and essayist Abdurraqib interweaves the contributions of major Black artists (Wu-Tang Clan, Aretha Franklin, Don Cornelius of Soul Train, Merry Clayton, FUPU, Joe Tex, Josephine Baker and a host of others) into the shaping of American entertainment, as well as his own upbringing and his own understanding of Black love, creativity, friendship, anger, and resilience. A little too much poetic sentimentality for me…more history!

A really unique read - Labatut seamlessly meshes historical fact and some fiction into a riveting set of stories, each detailing a particular troubled genius who contributed to the golden age (and its dark consequences) of quantum mechanics, with side forays into chemistry, mathematics, religion, and psychology. Eg, what to think of Fritz Haber, who harnessed nitrogen to fertilize/feed the world but also introduced poison gas to modern warfare?

I wanted to like this book - what with a young female protagonist who reads everything (from old Hollywood biographies to anarchic texts to physics tomes), and uses her vast stores of bookish knowledge to set about investigating the mysterious suicide of her favorite teacher on a camping trip. But….it‘s perhaps this same abundance of literary reference dotting every other sentence that made this novel feel a bit too heavy-handed and over-the-top.

This book was devastating for the fact that its largely autobiographical: the author‘s account of abysmal poverty as he grows up within a family attempting to make ends meet as itinerant workers/serfs, his older sisters sold into servitude for cruel landowners, his parents trying to fend off the miseries of locust swarms, dysentery and starvation, all while Syria navigates the end of the French Mandate and its wobbly first years of independence.

An immensely sad book (hence the “tragedy”) based on a real crime that took place in 1906, a young man drowning his pregnant girlfriend in a secluded Adirondack lake. Dreiser takes a long hard look at the unforgiving cultural and religious machinations demarcating social class and the lure of material wealth that eventually destroys these two young people‘s lives (the young man is eventually sent to the electric chair).

A young black man is imprisoned for allegations of rape of a white woman in apartheid South Africa. As he sits in his prison cell awaiting execution, he recollects to a Swiss psychoanalyst his boyhood, his parents, his ambitions to become his country's preeminent writer: a life disrupted by an infatuation he develops for a woman suntanning on a segregated beach.

A beautifully written book, full of one man‘s journal entries narrating his obsessive search for, and observations of, wintering peregrines in the marshy fenland of eastern England. Baker‘s keen eye teaches us patience and discernment, where we slowly learn to pick apart the beautiful patterns that underlie every wildlife scene: an activity so meditative and captivating, its hard to wrench yourself away as dusk falls at the end of each entry.

Everyone knows “I think, therefore I am” but after a full read-through of Descartes‘s Meditations in philosophy class, I wanted to know more about his work and life. I am fascinated by his emphasis that we should doubt our sensory views of the world for they are only a semblance of what he believes is the “true form” of the universe: a mathematical one, invisible initially, but eventually graspable by the rational human mind.

A 1986 autobiography spanning the life/career of the Father of Rock n‘ Roll, Chuck Berry‘s prose is true to form in that it‘s more half poetry-half song lyric. Berry relates his St. Louis upbringing, early blues inspirations and first recordings at Chicago‘s Chess Records before the newly minted rock n‘ roll really picks up. Even racism, his infidelities and several prison stints don‘t break his stride: “I would sing the blues if I had the blues.”

I elect this required reading. WNP Barbellion was the pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings, an avid English naturalist and diarist. Sadly, Cummings did not have very long to live (we now know he had multiple sclerosis). It‘s his written ruminations on death, on scientific ambitions cut short, and a great love for Literature, Nature and his wife/child that make this one of the greatest journals published. He died in 1919 at the age of 30.