Archive for the ‘books’ Category
As part of my “reading lots of books” project, I started reading Cloud Atlas (kindle edition) over the holidays. Quite frankly, I’d been completely underwhelmed by it but kept plugging away because of the hype assuming that it would eventually get better. Eveon so, yesterday, as I was sort of slogging through a low point [...]
A few weeks ago, in a contemplative moment, I realized that I missed reading novels. So I thought a bit about why I just didn’t seem to have time for novels anymore, and made a decision. I would experiment with only logging on to FB whenever I had finished reading a novel–as a reward for [...]
From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, by Terry Tempest Williams: I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin [...]
Because I’m such a fan of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, I chose to download another book by him that Amazon recommended, called Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Usually I avoid books like that that sound like the latest evolutionary-biology-turned-pop-psychology type of text. But based on my enjoyment of his [...]
My daughter’s photo accompanied a BlogHer post this week, that same image of our old living room bookshelves that the New Yorker online featured awhile back. As I read the BlogHer post and looked at the photo, I suppose it was really the first time I thought about our bookshelves as “gay.” I mean, these [...]
A colleague recently turned me in the direction of Wendell Berry’s writings, so I’ve been reading Hannah Coulter on my iPad while traveling. It’s such a quiet, easy book–one that makes me feel connected to land and family. Perhaps, so far (about halfway through), it paints too pretty a picture of Hannah’s world, but I [...]
I’m game to try nearly any new form of social media. I’m Instagramming, Flickr-ing, Google+ing, Gowalla-ing and Color-ing, in addition to the ‘traditional’ forms of Twitter, GoogleReader, Facebook and WordPress. A few things I’ve tried and rejected–I didn’t care much for Tumblr, for example. Or Foursquare. And I rarely consult Goodreads or LinkedIn, although I [...]
“Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality—that they would never countenance [...]
“So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time, and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world, she began to stand around the gate and expect things…She knew that God tore down the old world every morning and built a new one at sun-up. [...]
A huge part of me is tempted not to blog right now. My emotions are so mutable–it seems that if I write about what I’m feeling at this moment, in another few minutes I’ll feel radically different… As I sat in front of our rainbow bookshelves this morning and passed my eyes over each title, [...]
Last year in October I dyed some sections of my hair neon purple. There was no particular reason for me to have purple hair, it just seemed like something worth trying. I was curious if it wold affect the way people interacted with me and/or the way I felt about myself. As far as I [...]
As part of organizing my new office at Chapman University, I’m moving most of my academic books from the shelves in my living room over to campus. Every time I pull a history book off the shelf it brings back memories of the specific graduate school seminar where we studied that work. So in packing [...]
Conversation