Once I was sitting in the waiting room of an office when I looked up at the wall and saw thumbnail pictures of a certain president of the United States side by side with thumbnails of a certain favorite zoo animal. Wow, low blow, thought I. “Dangerous, simplistic.” “Frat boy.” “Neo-Fascist.” “Inept.” “Embarrassment.” These are the words we heard him called. What the hey?, thought [...]
I picked up two books this week. I opened one and found myself reading about an emotionally unstable woman. […]
It ain’t easy being a woman. It wasn’t back in the year 1979 when feminist Sonia Johnson publicly disagreed with the LDS church’s stance on ERA and, for her efforts, got excommunicated. It wasn’t in June of 2014 when Kate Kelly got excommunicated for founding Ordain Women. Both cases occurred in the leafy Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. (What is it about Virginia anyway?) [...]
I’m having trouble with my current read. Maybe I should just watch the mini-series. Here’s my problem: we have a main character whom we’ll call “Horace." We see everything from Horace’s point of view. We’re with Horace when Horace gives advice to his boss. We’re with Horace when he hands his horse off to the groom. We’re with Horace when he goes home to his [...]
When I announced that Christmas dinner would feature salmon, the skeptics among us kept their skepticism to themselves. Which was wise. […]
"I can see you want everything, . . . [k]ids, husband, career. The whole superwoman thing."So says one character to another in Rachel Pastan's Lady of the Snakes.Pastan's novel begins when Jane, the aspiring superwoman, gives birth to a daughter. She loves the little tyke, of course. But after a couple weeks of the foreignness of motherhood, Jane longs to get back to her dissertation. [...]
Remember Lawyer Rusty? Accused of murder? Guilty of canoodling with the Boy with Breasts?Well, we're back to him this week. In Scott Turow's Innocent, the sequel to Presumed Innocent, Rusty is now sixty years old. He's a respected judge in Kindle County. He wakes up one day to find that his wife has died beside him.He sits with her for 24 hours, absorbing this event, [...]
OK, I haven't exactly finished this one yet, but I'm in that part where the remaining pages are so few, they're thinner than a dinner napkin. (Virtually speaking. I'm reading it on Kindle.) I think that's far enough along to have gotten the drift of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, don't you?Ferris's characters work at a Chicago ad agency. They're living [...]
It started when I stayed up late last Sunday, reading some doom and gloom on the internet. Fortified by visions of a dire future, I trudged into a week in which:Bombs went off. Chemicals exploded. The daughter crashed her car. Tech problems up-ended the husband's workweek. A friend's mom died. Thunder crashed. Streams flooded. The toddler got defiant. And finally, PMS.You'd think I would appreciate [...]
You are a graffiti artist. The city is on to your tricks and sends crews out to clean up your artwork, almost by the next morning. Nearly all the walls in your city neighborhood have now been declared, by city ordinance, off-limits. You wake up one morning, go out on the street and see a stunning new work of graffiti on one of the forbidden [...]
