Yesterday I read Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart after going to see the movie over the weekend. I really enjoyed the movie and loved its book-loving characters and of course I loved the underlying message of the power of the written word. Great good comes from reading great…
Yesterday I read GirlBoyGirl, the self-told and self-serving story of Savannah Knoop. Knoop was the woman who pretended to be JT Elroy, a male prostitute/transgender/writer character made-up by Knoops’ sister-in-law; the sister-in-law did all the writing supposedly turned out by JT Elroy…
Thomas Pynchon writes the perfect guide to paranoia in The Crying of Lot 49(published in 1965). His gutsy and self-reliant heroine, Oedipa Maas (more about Pynchon’s fabulously funny names later) is named executor of the far-flung estate of an ex-boyfriend. Pierce…
Ian McEwan writes a different kind of love story in On Chesil Beach than he gave us in Atonement. Taking his time to bring us firmly into the wedding night anticipated by both Florence and Edward (Florence with fearful disgust of what is in store, and Edward in…
Yesterday I read Ten Poems to Set You Free by Roger Housden. Housden has written a series of books about poems, all with the theme of reading and using poems to help a person change themselves for the better. Housden writes with energy and sincerity and he picks great poems by good poets…
Chuck Klosterman is a funny guy. It would probably be pretty fun to hang out with him for one evening in some bar in North Dakota (as far as I can tell, his locale of choice for pounding beers and then getting into a car — his car should bear a large yellow triangular sticker…
Yesterday I read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. It is hysterically funny but then I’m American. If you’re English, then The Loved One must be dry humor, barely worth a guffaw. I’m taking my cues from Waugh, who makes the differences between Americans and Brits quite clear in this 1953 novel, one loud and…
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling is a great book. It is the story of half-dead boy — not half-dead from falling overboard off an ocean liner and almost drowned but half-dead because he is narrow-minded, spoiled, bored and selfish — who becomes fully…
It has been years since I’ve read anything by Anita Brookner and so I cannot tell whether or not The Rules of Engagement, which I read yesterday, is typical Brookner. I hope not: I hated it. It was well-written but I just could not stand anyone in the…
These were the top 10 stories published by Nina Sankovitch in January of 2009. You can also dive into daily archives for January of 2009 by using the calendar at the top of this page.