Do you think you will meet your long-gone pets after you die? Do you hope you will? I do, at least in the case of Trouble. He was an orange tuxedo cat, handsome as a movie star, loving as a baby, tolerant beyond belief of children who wouldn’t stop carrying him around like a sack of flour. In the case of Butterscotch, not so much. [...]
Would anybody here like to confess to morbid curiosity? No? Okay, then. I’ll go first. […]
Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth turned out to be a three-weeker. Last week, I accused him of running out of good ideas halfway through. This week I have to apologize and tell you that his story revived. […]
And how did your big game go? Did anybody get raped, pillaged, trampled under a horse, burned with torches, locked away in a cold isolation cell, anything like that? Oh, wait. Wrong game. You’ve been hearing all about the Super Bowl while I’ve been munching on tail-gater food, absorbed in the Medieval Bowl. Who's playing? Well, it's the Monks vs. the Earls. Mini Muffulettas [...]
I’ve got a fat book on my nightstand. I skip out on sleep and maybe dusting certain bookshelves to dedicate time to finishing this book, but it’s gonna be awhile. It’s a famous author’s first effort and, if you’ve hung around here long, you know I’m trying to catch up on my famous authors. Hopefully, we can talk about it next week. So, in honor [...]
We finish Bryan Burrough's Big Rich with tales of the great oilmen's posterity. As you might guess, the children of the rich can range anywhere from responsible and handsome fellows who grow the business and get invited to join the best clubs in Dallas, to cocaine-snorting ne'er-do-wells who own great football teams and attend cheerleader tryouts for all the wrong reasons.My own brush with oil [...]
I wish I had kept count of the miles I have walked this summer. We have got to be talking over five hundred. And oh, the things I see! The neighborhoods I want to move into! I used to suffer from house envy, but now I've calmed down to mere neighborhood envy. Then again, if I picked up and moved, I would have to give [...]
Finished up Julia Glass' Three Junes tonight, while sitting outside listening to the cicadas. It was a charming-enough moment, so long as I didn't think about the bedraggled mouse carcass somebody left on the deck. Many times, I thought of quitting this book. In the third June, we meet up with a woman whose list of men is long and sorry and wrong. While weekending [...]
Perhaps you've heard of Ravinia, the summer music venue in Chicago's North Shore suburbs.It consists of four important elements.1) Music. An orchestra plays. What do they play? It doesn't matter, especially if you sit in the cheap seats, i.e. the lawn. To experience it more as background music and less like college-class appreciative listening is OK with me.2) The beauty of nature. That would be [...]
Our lesson this week is: give the author a chance. When I opened M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing and read the first pages, I wasn't planning to stick with this story of a strangely grown-up-sounding boy surrounded by scholars. They drill him in Greek and Latin and violin lessons. They weigh everything he consumes, then weigh again when he excretes. They exact capricious punishments when [...]
