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...

                                                           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...

          Hello!!!  I'm feeling very cheerful tonight, because a few hours ago I went to an event called LIT Crawl and had a wonderful time.  And since it was a literary event, I thought I'd share it with you-all.           LIT Crawl is an event that takes place once a month in Brooklyn.  It is like a pub crawl in that many businesses (including bars) take part in it, but that is where the similarity ends, because instead of offering discounted alcohol, these businesses host free (!!) literary events all night long (or at least from 5:00 to 8:00 pm).  These events occur in three shifts so that people can fit in three different events in one night.  The events change from month to month, but they vary pretty widely.  For example, tonight I went to a performance art/poetry reading in a laundromat, in which the two performers danced on top of washing machines and discussed the voyeuristic and weirdly personal ...

     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...