Reader Writers' Faves Worn, Solid, Absolute — Mary Lang Staying Power — Paul Krueger Babbittry — Joe Daley Hillerman’s Climb — Colin Flaherty Macabre Reminder — Ray Westberg My Adult Card — Eleanor Widmer Not …
December 20, 1990
News & Stories
Reader writers tell their favorite books
Judith Moore favorites: Joan Didion, Richard Ford, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, John Updike, Tobias Wolff.
I have stretched out on the couch — a plumpish well-lit haven upholstered with rough, nubby cotton, ivory in color. In the kitchen the man I love shuts and opens and shuts the oven door. …
December 20, 1990
You start with Childe's What Happened in History, Clark's The First Half-Million Years
They said you might get out. You had a chance. Out of this hellhole. There's a secret. It's a game. That's what you think. Books. Salvation. To know is to be able. You start with …
December 20, 1990
My admiration for Jerzy Kosinski's Painted Bird and Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side
College professors strain to convince novitiates that the boring "masterpieces" of Western literature (Hemingway, Melville, James, etc.) deserve their reputations solely from the "test-of-time" standard. But I, for one, do not believe any worthwhile art …
December 20, 1990
For those who resist mystery novels, James Lee Burke is a find
James Lee Burke is one of those writers who has been quietly toiling in the vineyard (or cotton fields, he might say) for decades, producing first-class work that has remained invisible to the bookbuying public …
December 20, 1990
We couldn't get enough of the Brothers Karamazov
Once upon a time, I was a non-hippie proto-post-punk semi-amniotic undergraduate at UCSD, floundering in the concrete-and-topsoil wastes of an almost brand-new Muir College—searching for a major, a mentor, or something magic (not to mention …
December 20, 1990
I'm determined to pull A Christmas Carol from my bookshelf again
Dear ...I'm sure you've got snow, that your fireplace warms the living room. You can bet it's 70 here. I've just turned on the furnace for the first time, but even so, only after the …
December 20, 1990
As I Lay Dying, which prob'ly the most people read because it's the shortest
All right, let's see if I can do this in one sitting, no leaving the typer, a thousand words on Faulkner, should be a snap. Faulkner, wait, Hemingway. Why does (or did) anybody, even as …
December 20, 1990
Robert Louis Stevenson vs. Henry James on childhood
There are those authors who mean a lot to me because of how much they mean. I mean, how much they represent, signify, stand for, as separate from what they wrote. And they go on …
December 20, 1990
Dalmatian's last known speaker, one Antonio Udina, was blown up by a land mine in 1898
I know a written work whose scope and purpose are unsurpassed by any other in the English-speaking world. Moreover, I know of no other that can match its paradoxical ability to arouse, equally, both hope …
December 20, 1990
Let me root for underdogs Norman Maclean and Wendell Berry
All the usual suspects: the Bard, Chekjov, Emilk D., Villon, whoever wrote the Book of Job—ditto the Book of Love. But instead of playing favorites, I'd much rather plug a few texts that knocked me …
December 20, 1990
I plowed through The Interpretation of Dreams when I was 14
I read my first novel at the age of seven, after which the printed word became my obsession. In the ghetto where we lived, the public library was endowed by Andrew Carnegie; to get to …
December 20, 1990
Lord of the Flies in Vietnam
Lucid rays beaming down pencil thin through holes in the canvas, pierce the dim and give to the dead air an aura of nebulous presence — a macabre reminder, or perhaps visitation, by disembodied spirit. …
December 20, 1990
Tony Hillerman is half Sherlock Holmes, half Carlos Castaneda
My buddy Fred has been reading A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez for more than a year. But every time he picks it up, he falls asleep. "That's a great book," he …
December 20, 1990
I continued to read Babbitt through my four years at college
Thirteen years ago, while a freshman at a small private college in Florida, I picked up Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. An amusing, often vicious satire of mindless conformity and middle-class morals, Babbitt plucked a chord in …
December 20, 1990
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood showed me how good journalism can get
Newspapers - five of them each day — have consumed my reading hours for the past decade. That leaves little time for books, which often sit in stacks on my bedroom dresser, unopened, until they're …
December 20, 1990
Books about Seabiscuit, and Man o' War, and Mustang Annie – I read them all
I admit this wincing: For a time I was one of those little girls who lives for horses. Since living was for me largely a matter of reading, the obsession took the form of reading …
December 20, 1990
The death of Womancare's Deborah Fleming
“Yes. I remember the case,’’ the doctor said. “It was a home birth, with, I believe, a midwife. We could have saved the child, had it been born in the hospital or treated right away."
December 20, 1990
The marks on Jessica – could it be child abuse?
Her name was Jessica. Chubby arms and thighs, the skin electric with the immense energy of growth. No obvious illness, no dehydration or apparent pain here. Chewing on the stethoscope tube. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
December 20, 1990