rip fred bass, who gave nyc a priceless gift
Is there a New Yorker alive who hasn’t spend time in The Strand? A New York City tourist who didn’t thrill to their first visit to The Strand? The man…
what i’m reading
required reading for revolutionaries: jane mcalevey and micah white
I’ve wanted to write about these two books for a long time, but adequately summarizing them is a daunting task. I just want to say to every activist and organizer:…
what i’m reading: what i haven’t read and am not reading
Many of my co-workers keep colourful lists like this,or use Goodreads or Shelfari to track their reading.I prefer plain old text. Like most avid readers, my to-read list contains far…
what i’m reading: rolling blackouts, graphic novel that asks many big questions
I see by the wmtc tag “graphic novels” that I intended to write about graphic books I read and enjoyed…and I see by the scant number of posts with that…
listening to joni: a new wmtc feature
Two new books about Joni Mitchell have come out, with — strangely — the same title. Reckless Daughter: A Joni Mitchell Anthology, edited by Barney Hoskyns, is a collection of…
what i’m reading: turtles all the way down, the new book by john green
I don’t usually write about a book while I’m still under its spell, but there are always exceptions. John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down is an exceptional book. One…
what i’m reading: news of the world by paulette jiles
After burning through several excellent nonfiction books in rapid succession, I have a small pile of novels waiting for me. Here’s the first of, I hope, several fiction reviews. News…
what i’m reading: the radium girls by kate moore
Readers of a certain age might remember clocks and watches with glowing green dials. The dials were painted with radium, the radioactive element discovered by Marie Curie. We had clocks…
what i’m reading: the attention merchants by tim wu
Everywhere we look, every available space is filled with advertising. The Toronto skyline is a sea corporate logos. The due-date receipt from my library book features an ad on the…
what i’m reading: maximum security book club
I have an abiding interest in prison librarianship, and try to learn about it wherever I can. Whenever the OLA Superconference features a session on prison libraries, I attend. I’m…
what i’m reading: city on fire
I finished City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg’s astonishing debut novel, a few days ago, but stories from the book are still playing in mind. I initially didn’t want to…
the politics of the hardboiled detective novel
I love these old covers! Last year, I blogged about a wonderful essay by Raymond Chandler called “The Simple Art of Murder“, written in 1950. Reading that, I realized that…
what i’m reading: words on the move by john mcwhorter
John McWhorter is changing my mind about language. And that is no easy thing to do. I’m a grammarphile. Word nerd, language junkie, spelling nut, stickler — whatever you want…
authors i keep wanting to read but don’t
My book list is extremely long, so long that I don’t call it a reading list or a to-read list, because I will never read even half the books on…
what i’m reading: the new jim crow by michelle alexander
When I first heard the incarceration of African Americans in the United States referred to as a “new Jim Crow,” I thought it must be hyperbole. So did Michelle Alexander,…
what i’m reading: leaving lucy pear
The year is 1917. A teenage girl from a wealthy family is pregnant, the result of rape — by a man who her mother pushed her to pursue for marriage.…
what i’m reading: swing time by zadie smith
Zadie Smith is on my list of “authors I will follow anywhere”. I may not love everything about every book she writes, but that’s unimportant. For me, her books are…
what i’m reading: giovanni’s room by james baldwin
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, a landmark in LGBT literature, is one of our library’s current “Raves & Faves”. The 1956 novel takes place in Paris, narrated by a young American…