the book bum

          It's been way to long since I posted some yammerings here!  Sorry.  School started again and things got crazy.           I should be going to bed right now so this will have to be a short post.  I guess, since I am feeling very excited about the arrival of fall (Every time the seasons change I hyperventilate with joy! It's exhausting), I should make a list of cozy fall books.  Do you know what kind of books I mean?  Comforting, heart-melting ones.  I would not, for example, recommend The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or 1984 specifically for a list like this - the former is so ridiculous that it sort of stretches your mind out of shape like a very old T-shirt, and the latter makes you question EVERYTHING and wake up in cold sweats as you question the very nature of human nature.  Not that they are not phenomenal books; they just don't belong on this list.   Hitchhiker's Guide is OBVI...

        The best way to read during the summer is indoors with the AC waaaay up, so you can wrap yourself in blankets           Which means, I suppose, that I'm having a nice, relaxing summer so far.  My only other challenges have consisted of soaking up sunburn and working as an intern at a writing class for little kids.  But reading  The Dubliners, a famous collection of short stories set in Dublin, has proved harder than either of those.  To give you an idea of why, allow me to quote a few passages from the book:           "'Some of these fenians and hillsiders are a bit too clever if you ask me,' said Mr. Henchy" (pg. 125).           "'But I'm greatly afraid our friend is not nineteen carat.  Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can't understand is a fellow sponging'" (pg. 124).           "'He takes...

                                                           Wow, it feels like forever since I've done a regular book review.  Okay.   From Rockaway was the first library sale book I finished, and I am delighted with it.  It's short but the story feels dense.  Like how restaurants know to serve you small slices of really fudgy cake.             The book starts with four working-class kids from Rockaway Beach - Alex, Timmy, Chowderhead, and Peg - who are coming home from prom. (I think the story is set in the 80s.')  Of the four friends, only Alex is going to college. Continuing school is so rare in this neighborhood that seeing a kid go to bartending school is enough to make the whole community extremely proud, so Alex is a celebrated oddball.  But when the friends part ways tha...

      I know much less about music than I do about books, but I can definitely tell you that my taste in music is influenced by my appreciation for good writing.  I especially love songs with wordplay or that take on a slightly different meaning the more you listen to them.  With this in mind, I've compiled a list of my favorite poetic singers in the hopes that they will confound and delight you, too. 1. Marina Diamandis aka Marina and the Diamonds - She's probably my favorite singer of all time.  "Mowgli's Road" is one of her most poetic and clever songs, but I was totally mystified by it for a while. It's pretty clear that she's feeling pressure to conform to what the music industry wants from her, but then there's also this weird silverware metaphor about how "the cutlery will keep on chasing me" and how the "spoons are metally mean and "the knives are bloody cold".  It took me weeks before I suddenly had a eureka moment l...

     I read books indiscriminately.  I am just as happy reading  Beowulf, a crusty old Scandinavian epic poem, as I am reading  The Fault in Our Stars  by John Green.  So I'm not a snob who only reads first-edition classics bound in leather or anything like that.  But I do have one requirement when it comes to the books I read and recommend, and that is that they be good .  And I do see a problem emerging in one of YA's most popular new genres, the teen dystopian novel, and that is that many of these books are not good.      The dystopia craze started, I believe, with the success of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (a book that I very much adore) .   It's hard to make it as a writer, so when people saw how well her parable of futuristic teen angst and bloodshed did, they understandably thought Aha!  Here is the formula for success!!   And ten seconds later, the front display tables of every Barnes a...