Category: Uncategorized
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Books read in 2018
Books! Best to worst. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One hundred years of solitude A re-read of the magic masterpiece. Colson Whitehead, The underground railroad Gorgeous prose and a wildly imaginative literalization of one the most important metaphors in American history. Robert Hughes, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History Highly idiosyncratic history of Rome through the eyes of…
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Books read in 2017
Books! Best to worst. Too many music books, as usual, but hey. Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts Wack. Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music Six extraordinary conversations about music with Seiji Ozawa. Steve Turner, Beatles, ’66: The Revolutionary Year How a boy band became a zeitgeist. Robert Irwin, The Alhambra The story of “The Red” — the only Muslim palace…
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Imitation is the sincerest form of larceny
So I’ve been writing for the YMCA of Greater New York for a little over five years, helping them with fundraising in particular. I used to write for the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, but I haven’t done so in several years. Recently I noticed a few “echoes” — headlines or themes I had created for New…
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Books read in 2016
Books! Best to worst. Paul Beatty, The Sellout Extraordinary, hilarious, brilliant. Racial stereotypes dancing in front of a funhouse mirror of satire, through a knowing lens of American literature and culture (both African- and Anglo-). More great comic one-liners per page than any other fancy hardbound book I’ve ever read. Jon Meachum, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power…
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Books read in 2015
Obviously I read far too few books this year. From the best to the least best: Ben Yagoda, The B-side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song A very interesting history of the evolution of popular American music, particularly with its insights in the twenty years following World War II. Tom…
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Hitch-22 : Christopher Hitchens
Further proof that erudition does not equal intelligence. Despite a moving account of his youth, the book devolves into an extended rationalization of Hitchens’s approval of the Iraq invasion by his adopted country, the United States. That and the book’s meaningless, arbitrary title undermine its narrative and its pretension to intellectual rigor, by unfairly borrowing…