I’ve wanted to read Nicholson Baker for a while now, and with his new, controversial book Checkpoint coming out, I figured it was time (that review is coming up).
Book of Matches, like all of Baker’s fiction, is a short book — under 200 pages, and incredibly focused. Each 3-5 page chapter is the 1st person narrative [...]
There’s no way around it: we’re in an unfortunate period in our nation’s history — one that’s gotten particularly polarized and nasty and personal and divisive. One signal is that politics is creeping into everything we do, including the books that we read, more than ever.
This is an even shorter & more focused book than [...]
My great aunt Laura Lilly McMichael died yesterday afternoon, at the age of 95. She’d moved to Atlanta a couple of years ago, away from Quitman, GA, where she lived virtually her whole life.
Laura was the 4th of 5 children of my great grandfather, Homer Lilly — she came a couple of years after my [...]
I’d recommend you read anything that Richard Russo writes — he’s fantastic. I read Empire Falls a couple of years back — a Pulitzer-winning novel. His novels aren’t really about all that much — mostly about small town life in the Northeast. But here’s why I read them: he writes with such empathy that you [...]
Took my third trip to Detroit last week (and drove up to London, Ontario for a quick meeting as well) — went to see GM & DaimlerChrysler. First, I should say that GM & Chrysler are both incredibly impressive, and I thought it was sort of cool that I got to visit two of the [...]
Kathy & I spent last weekend in Vancouver, BC for a wedding of Natalya Eliashberg, a friend of ours from her days at MIT. She and her husband Mike worked at and met at a company called Immersion (http://www.immersion.com) here in the Bay Area — started by an HCI classmate of mine from Stanford.
[Aside: Immersion [...]
I was excited to read this new book by Tom Perotta, who also wrote Election, which was eventually made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. The movie was tremendously witty and biting and sharp — and very cynical.
So when I opened up Little Children and noticed right away that it deals basically [...]