From One Book Lover

Famous Blue Raincoat It's four in the morning, the end of December I'm writing you now just to see if you're better New York is cold, but I like where I'm living There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening. I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.  Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair She said that you gave it to her That night that you planned to go clear Did you ever go clear? Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder You'd been to the station to meet every train And you came home without Lili Marlene And you treated my woman to a flake of your life And when she came back she was nobody's wife. Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth One more thin gypsy thief Well I see Jane's awak...

My Yoko Ono Moment for Nick Twemlow It’s annoying how much junk mail comes through the slot & accumulates at the foot of the stairs mostly menus from restaurants in the neighborhood endlessly coming through the slot despite the sign we put on the door: No Advertisements No Solicitors One night I scoop up the whole pile on my way out (as I do periodically) & dump it in the trash can on the corner of West Broadway & Spring just as Yoko Ono happens to be strolling through SoHo with a male companion She watches me toss the menus then turns to her friend & says, “I guess no one reads those.” by David Trinidad courtesy poets.org  ...

Amidst the heat of summer and the heft of books being carried in the summer heat, now is a good time to ponder the e-book. I used to think of my e-book reader (Kindle, for those keeping score at home) as a tool I kept for convenience and desperation. I am a Print Girl, now and forever. But as I considered how to find new homes for my already-read books, I had to wonder: why remain married to print for every book? I'm not keen on the control Amazon has over my reader and its contents. Sure, I can get a refund, but if Amazon can put a book on my reader, it can take it off. (And has, for other readers in the past.) I prefer my e-books inexpensive. Right now I'm considering an e-copy of my favorite Marge Piercy poetry book, but it's more than a couple of bucks. I realize that some older books haven't yet gone "e," but the absurd price of an e-book astounds me. Maybe I don't know enough about the process of e-publishing, but I also can...

Eve O. Schaub would like you to know that She and Her Family Survived a Year Of Limited Sugar Consumption. But they're okay now. Schaub was inspired by the research and lifestyle changes of Robert Lustig , a professor at University of California, San Francisco, who convinced her in a 90-minute video that sugar was poison. She did her own research, found resources, and in turn convinced her family to spend a year not adding fructose to their diets. (Her children are in elementary school, so she made exceptions.) At the end of the year, everyone was relieved and the experiment was over. She blogged about it, and she turned her blog posts into a book titled Year of No Sugar: A Memoir . I'm sure her blog was fine, but the posts didn't succeed in creating a successful, readable memoir. I didn't enjoy the book for a number of reasons. As a memoir, Year of No Sugar was written in too casual a tone. The language was chatty, the vocabulary colloquial, the humor forced...

Without further ado, here's what my Reading Wish List for the summer, in no particular order: A Discovery of Witches trilogy Tobacco Road Wild The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay The Sixth Extinction Divergent trilogy Map of the Sky Peyton Place The Gods of Manhattan Golem and the Jinni Bellman and Black True Grit The Hangman's Daughter NOS4A2 And the Mountain Echoed Shadowfever The Goldfinch The Lowland 11/22/63 I am Malala Everything Changes Far From the Tree Dangerous Women 168 Hours in a Day The Decameron The Heptameron The Gun Seller The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag The Eye of Zoltar Lost Cat Bellman and Black The Fault in Our Stars Cloud Atlas The Mysterious Benedict Society A Penny Vincenzi novel The Family Fang Arcadia Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Poisoner's Handbook Winter's Tale Oh, good heavens, that's an ambitious list of 44 books, and it doesn't include most of what has ...

Now is the time to start thinking about summer reading — and the Summer Reading Club! Oh, I'm sure you have been pondering your bookish possibilities, sorting the stacks in your head when you look at your shelves (or those in your local library). However, now it's time to get serious. Some books cry out to be read in the sunshine. Others are more subtle, encouraging you consider the possibilities. Some you've been saving for this very purpose. Maybe it's a trilogy that the author finally finished (or has announced the publication date of the final book in the series). You knew it would be in July, so you planned your Independence Day weekend accordingly. There's the one that is set in winter. You tried to start it last December, but the chill was too biting. Skip the parka, bask in the sun. Some books are safe only in the sunshine. (Yes, that one.) So, start stacking them up: we have less than a week before the frenzy begins. If you own th...

Translator’s Confession, 3 a.m. Dear C, I dropped your sentence in hot water. I talked to the boil. I said Here is my thumb for you to burn. Here is the soft heart of my hand and my arm and the nape of my wreck. I said vapor, just take me. I’m done burning with these pages. Being invisible doesn’t mean a person won’t blister, doesn’t mean the blisters won’t fill with pockets of water or when lanced the rawest flesh won’t emerge. First the word then the murky leak begins—what another mind may scrape against but never skin. By Idra Novey Courtesy poets.org About this Poem:  “I wrote this poem as a way to settle some unfinished business I had with Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose work I’d been reading intensely for nearly a decade and whose novel I’d recently translated. As is the natur...