So I’m eating pineapple and considering this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners and these are not unrelated, because both activities aim at healthfulness. The truth is I’d rather be eating Krispy Kreme and reading Neuromancer, but my cholesterol has taken a slight uptick. It puts me in mind of my mortality, yet even as I approach …
I’ve begun reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to the boys. It’s by Kate DiCamillo, author of Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Despereaux. She had me at the verse with which she begins her novel, excerpted from Stanley Kunitz’s “The Testing-Tree:” The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is …
So what do I have in common with Annie Dillard, Ron Hansen, Kathleen Norris, and Valerie Sayers? We’re all in Image Journal’s 20th-anniversary anthology, Bearing the Mystery. You should buy a copy.
Isaiah is sitting on the floor surrounded by books. He opens one with a crinkle of its pages and says, “Shoo-chi-joo-sho-nay-nay-da.” He slaps it shut. “De end.” He picks up another, mutters out his own version of its narrative, and flips it closed. “De end.” This goes on for some time. “Joo-sho-nay-di-shoo-chi.” Slap. “De end.” …
The most lied-about book in England? Orwell’s 1984. For me it’s business books. The only thing worse, I think, than reading The Black Swan would be having an enthusiast recount it to me chapter by chapter. So what books do you lie about reading?
I’ve just finished Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, a novel about the Battle of Thermopylae that is far more faithful to history than the stunning film, 300. The story is told from the vantage point of a single survivor, who has been kept alive by the Persian King Xerxes to understand his Greek foes, in …
