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Advice from Miguel de Cervantes for the new year
What a pleasure to read Andrew Revkin’s New Year’s post over at the New York Times quoting a marvelous passage from the great “Don Quijote,” by Miguel de Cervantes, arguably the greatest novel of all...
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From 2012 to 2013
For several years I’ve been keeping a running list of books I read per year. During 2012, I averaged not quite a book a week and hope to increase that number in 2013. I also hope to read a few more...
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Crazy clients? Read Elena Ferrante’s Days Of Abandonment
James Wood reviews Elena Ferrante’s novels in The New Yorker, so now seems like a good time to paste the review I wrote of one of that Italian writer’s novels for The Europa Challenge Blog. I once...
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Elena Ferrante is my #FridayReads AGAIN
I’ve written before of how powerful I’ve found the novels of the pseudonymous Italian writer Elena Ferrante. When I noticed her latest book, “My Brilliant Friend,” on my local library’s new books...
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3 wonderful website reasons why I don’t always read a book a week
One of my goals for 2013 is to read at least 52 books. In 2012, I averaged just under a book a week. That is a fair amount of reading, though it’s only fair to note that most of my choices were not...
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Progress report: Dickens down and articles published
Recently, after a couple of years of spending way too much time thinking and talking about it, I finally buckled down and read another Dickens novel. The reason it took me so long to get around to it...
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Charles Dickens, George Zimmerman, and Trayvon Martin
Instead of watching the George Zimmerman trial, I was reading “Little Dorrit.” The long 19th century novel by Charles Dickens had been on my list for a LONG time, and it had been a few years since I’d...
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Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin, and backing it up
I’ve just finished Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens, which came out a couple of years ago and had been sitting on my nightstand in a TBR stack. I was really looking forward to seeing what...
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Aya is back!
From checking Amazon and Drawn and Quarterly’s website I knew there were more than the 3 collections of Aya comic strips that were available in my public library and which I read and enjoyed three...
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Cross-examinations and Author Interviews
A good author interview, like a good cross-examination, is a thing of beauty. In both, the lawyer or interviewer seeks to flesh out a story. For the lawyer, the story is the one told by the witness,...
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Martin Luther King Day, Father Pfleger, and stories
Getting to hear the remarkable Fr. Michael L. Pfleger speak on violence last week at a meeting of an organization of lawyers and judges to which I belong was especially timely given that today is...
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Let’s get this blog restarted!
I’ve been keeping track of the books I read for several years. I just reviewed what I’ve read so far in 2014 and counted 31. OK, one’s a picture book, but still that’s a pretty respectable total for...
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Chicago Taxi Writer
I had to take a taxi tonight and had the unexpected good fortune to hail Jack Clark, a Chicago writer and cabdriver, who made me a gift of one of his books. Mr. Clark used to write for the Chicago...
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Law and Horror: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Halloween week seemed like a good time to reread some 19th century horror fiction, so I downloaded the free e-book for Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” To my surprise, I found a...
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Martin Luther King Day, Father Pfleger, and stories
Getting to hear the remarkable Fr. Michael L. Pfleger speak on violence last week at a meeting of an organization of lawyers and judges to which I belong was especially timely given that today is...
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Why read disturbing fiction?
The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Jonathan Franzen, who has chosen Kenzaburo Oe’s “A Personal Matter,” a novel published in 1964, for the WSJ Book Club. I particularly enjoyed Franzen’s...
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