This year’s Booker longlist is dominated by women. Broken record alert. There is obviously no need for a separate prize for women. Also. The idea that Mantel’s weighty tome The Mirror & the Light is on the same list as Tyler’s shortish story Redhead by the Side of the Road is ludicrous. Makes me want to re-read Edward St. Auban’s ludic satirical masterpiece Lost for Words. Where a cookbook wins the literary prize. The 2020 full longlist is: Diane Cook, “The New Wilderness” Tsitsi Dangarembga, “This Mournable Body” Avni Doshi,… Read more Woman Booker Redux →
Ben Dolnick muses about his writing style in today’s New York Times. He often and purposefully uses parentheses and likens them now to the time we are in. Hope we get that coin and surface soon. A clause set off by em dashes is like dropping underwater while swimming breaststroke — just a quick dip before popping back to the sentence’s surface. A parenthetical clause is more like diving down to the pool bottom to pick up a coin. And a footnote is a full-blown scuba dive — you have… Read more As An Aside →
by Tara Isabella Burton in today’s NYTimes. Many young people are returning to old-world religious ceremonies and traditions, as they call it bells & smells. Such is the Christmas Eve midnight mass at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine which has recently become an annual pilgrimage for my millennial son & me. Incense, candles, carols, organ, harp, saxophone, choir. Gorgeous and moving. We love it. Our son was raised nada, yet enjoyed holiday celebrations of his father’s Jewish family and my Catholic one. But. I’d go to a Latin mass… Read more Weird Christianity →
Fascinating reads. NYTimes’ Alexandra Alter article on the alarming similarities between Sarah Dinzel’s Saving April, and the wildly best selling The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn (aka Dan Mallory). Alter references Ian Parker’s even more stunning exposé in this month’s New Yorker about “The Talented Mr. Mallory.” Stranger than any fiction.
Book - Treks 