Some of the best books I read last year: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen; A Promised Land by Barack Obama....
Five-Star Reads
For as awful a year as 2020 was, at least it was good for me in one respect: I read a number of great books last year. Here are the books I liked enough to give five-star ratings to on Goodreads in 2020: The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey. You will have read...
Questions For The Author
Author Jonathan Franzen, in the essay “On Autobiographical Fiction,” part of his 2012 collection Farther Away, writes that whenever a novelist gives a public talk or reading, he or she is invariably asked four “unpleasant questions.” They are, he writes “apparently the price we have to pay for the pleasure of appearing in public.” The...
“You Are Welcome Here”
I guess we all have our Sunday-morning rituals. For me, the last couple of years, it has included a trip to Manor Grove nursing home in Kirkwood to spend time with my mom, who lived there in the late stages of her fight with Alzheimer’s, and with my dad, who came directly from church...