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BURNETT TELLS SAD BUT SATISFYING STORY

5/16/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we're not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world.
​​Studs Terkel
Author of ​Working
​Born May 16, 1912
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S. Terkel

MY BOOK WORLD

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Burnett, Carol. Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story. New York: Simon, 2013.

In the actress’s storied life, Carol Burnett studied journalism while a young woman at UCLA. She’s intelligent, and such intelligence is evident through her writing. Her books are not (I assume) as-told-to books. She pens each one herself, and has only the light touch (I assume again) of a competent but kind editor. Why this introduction?
 
One might think that because Ms. Burnett is such a gifted comedian (comedienne in the old days, the Frenchiness of which I kind of liked) that her books are filled with mirth. They are. But this book, in particular, covers the beat of pathos in all its glory.
 
In her marriage to TV producer Joe Hamilton, Carol gives birth to three daugh . . . three beautiful daughters, like their mother! The first one is Carrie, and as an adolescent she sheds her wholesome, curious persona and becomes withdrawn and sullen. She begins to do poorly in school. She is on drugs. Carol and her husband do all they can to try to help her until they see their efforts are doing no good. Then they put her in rehab. When released from treatment, everything seems all right; only it isn’t. She finds drugs again (or they find her). Back into rehab she goes. Tough love is very difficult for Ms. Burnett, but she herself is a tough cookie. It was never beneath her to invite one of her co-stars to leave her show if he was unhappy; she did it kindly but she did it tough. It was not beneath her to sue the National Enquirer for publishing the false statement that she got drunk and started an argument with statesman, Henry Kissinger. She won.
 
The second rehab does take, and Carrie begins to pursue the artist’s life (in the broadest sense, including songwriting, fiction writing, and performing). She sustains a short marriage, and when it’s over she retains the cabin they’d shared in Gunnison, Colorado. It is her haven, her place to work and BE.
 
When symptoms indicate there is something wrong with Carrie’s health, doctors discover she has lung cancer (she names the tumor Yuckie Chuckie). Ms. Burnett weaves together the poignant story between her and Carrie by way of their emails, calls, and diaries. As a bonus to her readers, Carol includes Carrie’s short story, “Sunrise in Memphis.” The book is not to be missed, if you’re a fan of either woman.

Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Mary Pope Osborne

WEDS: A Writer's Wit |Alexander Pope
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Arthur Conan Doyle
FRI: My Book World | Graham Norton, The Life and Loves of a He Devil

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ALVAREZ EXPANDS MEANING OF AFTERLIFE

5/9/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.
​Richard Adams
Author of ​Watership Down
​Born May 9, 1920
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R. Adams

MY BOOK WORLD

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Alvarez, Julia. Afterlife: A Novel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2020.

A woman in her sixties loses her husband, and she turns to her three sisters, on whom she has depended since her childhood. Afterlife is more than a novel title here; it is a motif formed over and over again. The woman must now figure out how to live her afterlife: life without her husband, life with weird, bothersome neighbors, life with insistent and sometimes needy sisters. Yet because of these numerous eruptions of life going on around her, she must adjust. She must help others in the midst of her own grief. In the end, after aiding one sister as well as a stranger in need (an undocumented pregnant teenager), she is able to settle down to her singular life, and she has earned it. But one gets the feeling that if the story were to continue, the woman would still be interrupted by others in need and she would indeed help them. That’s who she is. That is her life, her afterlife.

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Madeleine Albright

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Eoin Colfer
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lauren Myracle
FRI: My Book World | Carol Burnett, Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story

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LONG-AGO MURDER HISTORY UNCOVERED

5/2/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
We have to unclutter our brains from worries that maybe people don’t like us. Women tend to worry about popularity; it doesn't matter if they like you. They need to respect you. They need to show that respect for you in your pay check. And that needs to be okay.
​Mika Brzezinski, NBC News
Author of ​All Things at Once
Born May 2, 1967
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M. Brzezinski

MY BOOK WORLD

Thompson, Wright. The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. New York: Penguin, 2024.

This excellent narrative reveals the horrifying story of the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, in 1955. The author himself is from this region of the Mississippi delta, and part of the book is confessional, if not much of the tone. His only atonement, if that is the right word, for he doesn’t even learn of the murder until he is about to leave the state for college, is to research this story and present it to us, hopefully readers from around the world. 
    
Young Emmett begs his mother to leave Chicago and travel with a friend and his parents to Mississippi, where his mother grew up. Something tells her not to let him. It may be that his frank and prankish nature could get him into trouble, but in the end, he convinces her. There is so much that is not known, mostly because so many people lie about the situation. Some say the murder takes place in a particular barn. Others say not. Some stories indicate Emmett “whistles” at a young married white woman running the little store he and his cousin enter to buy snacks. Others say he may whistle but not “at” the woman.

We do know, however, for sure, the two men responsible for murdering the person who is but still a child. The duo are put on trial locally, and the jury sets them free. The only justice available may be that the local whites then quite hypocritically treat the two men like pariahs for the rest of their lives. Except for little jobs here and there, they can’t get regular work. Their wives leave them, and both of them eventually die of cancer, almost literally as if the stress of committing their bad deed has eaten them alive.
    
​The book is something for all Americans to consider, however, not just southerners or Mississippians. Nearly every state in the union has in some way treated blacks (and other minorities) just as cruelly in one way or another. We must not rely any longer on the thinking that because we weren’t present during times of slavery that we’re not responsible. What was termed Reconstruction must be completed for there ever to be any peace in this country. 

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret C. Nussbaum

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Edward Gibbon
FRI: My Book World | Julia Alvarez, Afterlife: A Novel
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MYTH OF NORMAL EXPLICATED

4/25/2025

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A  WRITER'S WIT
Our nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination . . . rationalized by an attitude of “romantic paternalism” which,  in practical effect, put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.
​William Joseph Brennan  
Author of Conscience of the Court
Born April 25, 1906
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W. J. Brennan

MY BOOK WORLD

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Maté, Gabor, with Daniel Maté. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. New York: Avery, 2022.

Maté’s thesis is that Western medicine has assumed for a long time what is “normal,” and what is not. He contends that our physical and physiological lives are severely affected by what happens and what does not happen to us in our childhoods:
 
“Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being, seen and accepted, even by loving parents. Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune . . . and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied” (23).
 
This struck a chord (ha) with me concerning my childhood. My parents met my physical needs but didn’t have much sensitivity to my wishes to learn piano. I harped (ha ha) for four years on the topic until, at age ten, I was finally rewarded with lessons (and a $150 piano which I treasured). But their lack of interest in my “attunement” meant that they didn’t care much for my sensitivity as a musician, an artist, or human being. They kept trying to interest me in more “masculine” activities, meaning they did not accept me for who I was. It was a conditional “love,” if you want to call it that. My saving grace, through the years, thankfully, has been the help I received from three talented psychologists: one when I was twenty-four, one when I was in my fifties, and one I see currently in my seventies. Making myself more “loveable” to myself, I believe, made me less available to suffering major diseases or even middling chronic ones.
 
Maté’s contention is that most all disease is caused by mental or psychological stress that alters the body, making its autoimmune failure more likely one will suffer illness.
 
There is so much more that Dr. Maté offers to the reader in these 562 pages, but I do want to cite one statement he makes near the end of the book:
 
“At present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession—albeit a resistance more subliminal than deliberate, more passive than active. In the dozens of interview I conducted with medical colleagues for this book,  including recent graduates, virtually one of them recalled being taught about the mind-body unity or the profusely documented relationship between, for example, trauma and mental illness or addictions—let alone the links between adversity and physical disease” (487).
 
I wish all adults in the world could read this book and be pushed to take care of their total health, not just the physical being (if that)—seek out doctors who do see a connection between the mental and physical body and treat their patients accordingly.

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Rod McKuen

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | John Boyne
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lorene Scafaria
FRI: My Book World | Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi ​[Emmett Till]

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FINDING THE FOUNDING FISH

4/18/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure—that is all that agnosticism means.
​Clarence Seward Darrow  
Author of Attorney for the Damned
Born April 18, 1857
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C. Darrow

MY BOOK WORLD

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McPhee, John. The Founding Fish. New York: Farrar, 2002.

This is the first I have read of the more than fifty books McPhee has published in his ninety-four years on earth, and I have to say it has been a revelation. I’m not one who fishes (maybe . . . for compliments, never the icky, slimy things that come out of the water), but I found this a fascinating history of the American shad. Its life cycle as both a saltwater and freshwater fish. Its boundless energy to overcome humanmade obstacles (dams for one). Its ability to rebound after a period of overfishing. Its delight as food (in spite of its many bones):
 
“When Alexander Wilson named this fish sapidissima in 1811, he was referring almost certainly to the nutty-buttery succulence of the main muscle, but the roe is the tongue of the buffalo, the tip of the asparagus, the cheek of the halibut, the marrow of the osso bucco” (295).
 
McPhee’s Appendix consists of nothing but recipes, one of which lists these ingredients:
 
      2 pounds shad
      1 pair roe
      1 tbs. chopped parsley
      Pepper, salt (if desired)
      1 tbs. butter
      Soft bread crumbs
      Clarified butter
      ½ cup sauterne
      1½ cup chopped mushrooms
      1 tsp. paprika (348)
 
Yet there are historic objectors to the art/craft/sport of fishing: “The poet Byron said it best: “[T]he art of angling [is] the cruelest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretended sports” (313).
 
There you have it! McPhee covers both sides of the story, the equation, the diet!

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ellen Glasgow

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Barry Hannah
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley MacLaine
FRI: My Book World | Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

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KILLING YOUR MOTHER: A NOVEL

4/11/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.
​Glenway Wescott
Author of Apartment in Athens
​Born April 11, 1901
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G. Wescott

MY BOOK WORLD

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Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.

This may be one of those novels that you don’t want to continue after reading the first sentence: When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily”(3). But then then comes the next sentence: “Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it”(3).  Interesting! you may think. Onward you go . . . and then you are hooked, as I was—queasy feelings subsiding. The middle-aged narrator, Helen, continues her story of caring for her mother for nearly three hundred pages, and honestly, you’re not sure what is going to happen.

Will Helen leave the country, or at least the area of Pennsylvania where she lives? Will she off herself like her father did some years earlier? Will she tell her two young adult daughters she’s murdered their grandmother? Will her ex-husband (whom she tells first of the murder) help her cover it up or escape the police? Will she continue the affair she’s begun with the thirty-year-old son of her best friend? Whoa!

You just can’t believe the behavior of this woman until the author skillfully wends readers through her family’s backstory. Then her life only becomes more complicated, and you may develop sympathy for her. It could happen to you! What will she do? you continue to think, until the very last pages. A true murder mystery—not one of those cozy contrived things. Only the “mystery” here may be why she really done it, and the author presents readers with a plausible and satisfying answer.

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Eva Figes

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Peter Ustinov
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Isak Dinesen
FRI: My Book World | John McPhee, The Founding Fish

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IS GRADUATE SCHOOL REAL LIFE?

4/4/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.
​Maya Angelou,  Poet
Author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Born April 4, 1928
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M. Angelou

MY BOOK WORLD

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Taylor, Brandon. Real Life: A Novel. New York: Riverhead, 2020.

In this fairly recent title (a so-called campus novel), young Wallace leaves his home state of Alabama to pursue graduate school in biochemistry at a major university in the Midwest. In most respects the years-long experience does not go well. 
 
As a young black man, Wallace encounters subtle but resistant racism among his colleagues, even though, on the surface, things are cool. Compounding this problem is the fact that he’s out-and-proud gay. In one salty situation, he believes a woman has purposely ruined his experiment, putting him back months in his research. He just can’t prove it, and because of a lifetime of being put down, he doesn’t have the energy to pursue the justice of the matter.
 
The major relationship he develops is with Miller, an ostensibly straight white man, a handsome man to whom Wallace is quite attracted. Author Taylor subtly but competently creates all the complications that such a relationship can have. Wallace, a bit insecure about his looks and build, feels weird about Miller’s attentions—causing him to send Miller mixed signals. In turn, Miller, rife with his own insecurities, doesn’t believe Wallace is sincere. Repeatedly, they send and receive communications that don’t make clear who they are or what their intentions are. These conflicts lead to a couple of dramatic scenes. One, after sharing the sordid stories of their past, Wallace leaves Miller’s bed in the middle of the night, angering Miller. Second, the two men engage in a fist fight that Wallace loses against the more muscular Miller. They seem to semi-settle their differences, but they certainly do not live together happily ever after. In fact, the denouement of the novel seems to occur when the author returns the cast of characters to the first day they arrive on campus—when everyone’s, including Wallace’s, expectations are high. It seems to be a subtle way the author establishes what real life is all about. The term is tossed about throughout the novel, but in this particular conclusion, readers understand that university life is real life, not just that period that is to follow commencement exercises.

Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Ayer Barnes

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Charles Baudelaire
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Lamott
FRI: My Book World | Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon: A Novel

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QUEENS OF SOLVING CRIME

3/21/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and “live” with the characters.
Margaret Mahy
Author of A Lion in the Meadow
​Born March 21, 1936
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M. Mahy

MY BOOK WORLD

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Benedict, Marie. The Queens of Crime: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 2025.

I sometimes think that wish fulfillment may be a driving force in writing fiction. The writer is able to bring to life a scenario by way of fiction that was impossible for its time in real life. Perhaps that is the case for Ms. Benedict, who takes five of the most celebrated female mystery writers of the 1930s and places them as characters in the same novel setting of London: Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Emma Orczy.
 
The women essentially crash the local Detection Club, which is male dominated in every way. The women plan to solve a local murder not only to show the men in the club that they can but also the local police who otherwise treat them with disdain. The case they tackle involves a young English nurse who makes what is to be a short excursion to France (the ferry provides a day trip). She never returns alive, as her body is discovered in a wooded area. The five queens of crime set about working together to solve the murder. Though they have their squabbles, they see that cooperation is quite useful. 
 
I don’t usually read mysteries, but my curiosity, for some reason, was piqued by this one. I’m not sorry I read it. It’s a page-turner, all right, but an intelligent one! Perhaps I shall read more of the genre.

Up Next:
​TUES APR 1: A Writer's Wit | Jesmyn Ward

WEDS APR 2: A Writer's Wit | Hans Christian Andersen
THURS APR 3: A Writer's Wit | Jane Goodall
FRI APR 4: My Book World | Brandon Taylor, Real Life: A Novel

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'PREP': SMARTASSES ON STEROIDS

3/14/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
​Albert Einstein
Author of The Evolution of Physics
​Born March 14, 1879
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A. Einstein

MY BOOK WORLD 

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Sittenfeld, Curtis. Prep: A Novel. New York: Random, 2005.

I’m not sure why, but I’m drawn to so-called campus novels—perhaps it is something against which I can hold up my own experiences of adolescence. This one takes place at a prep school, Ault, in Massachusetts. Prep, at least this school, is a cross between an all AP-class high school and a small college occupied by smartasses.
 
Sittenfeld, given that she is about thirty as she publishes this novel, is perhaps the proper age to recreate such a world, about a half a life ago. The memory is still sharp concerning details she uses: aromas of freshly pubescent boys and girls, smells of institutional food, smells arising amidst the chalk dust and musty books and papers of a long-established institution. She recreates the emotions of that age, yet instead of going home to your parents each night, you’re returning to a dorm to eke out a life with someone you either hate or someone you adore (maybe the sophomore year onward). 
 
Lee Fiora, a fourteen-year-old frosh, is bright enough to be on scholarship, and yet she feels insecure much of the time. At her middle school in South Bend, Indiana, she was a genius, but at Ault she is just one among many—many who seem to be far more ambitious than she is, as well. They seem not to have holes in their education as she does in the field of math. Not only that, but most of the students hail from rich families from the Northeast, and even though some of them befriend her, she never feels quite at home with such people.
 
One might be jealous of Sittenfeld for writing such an engaging, successful novel the first time around if it weren’t such an enjoyable piece of literature to read. It isn’t just about a bunch of teenagers but it is about those teenagers’ education: academic, personal, literary, social, and cultural. In this novel, they seem to learn it all—in four short and quick years.

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Wilfred Owen

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Garth Greenwell
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lois Lowry
FRI: My Book World | Marie Benedict, The Queens of Crime: A Novel

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SPYING, SERIOUS BUSINESS

3/7/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.
​Amanda Gorman, Poet
Author of Call Us What We Carry
Born March 7,  1998
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A. Gorman

MY BOOK WORLD 

Haseltine, Eric. The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy’s Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat. With a foreword by General Michael V. Hayden. New York: St. Martin’s, 2019.

I’ve never seen so many abbreviations for governmental organizations in one book, the easiest to remember of which may be NATO or NSA. Memorize these and more—OPS2, DARPA, IARPA, NSAAB, DS&T, SIGINT, TOPS, RSO, HUMINT—and the book is a joy to read. Seriously, the story, once the author gets to the heart of it, is quite titillating—especially if you’re into reading spy craft literature.
 
In the late 1970s, Charles Gandy is an NSA operative sent to Moscow to investigate the US embassy there. He discovers a “chimney” in the embassy building which is adjacent to a Russian government structure, which is not a chimney at all but a tall empty chamber aiming what looks like an antenna directly at the ambassador’s apartment in the embassy. For six years, Gandy fights others in his own organization, not to mention the CIA and the State department, to bring what seems may be a breach to the attention of muckety-mucks in the US government. Many interesting pages unravel that story, the gist of which is: A certain underling working for Gandy uncovers in about half of the thirty IBM Selectric typewriters a bar in which is embedded a transmitter that “reads” each typewriter key and thus translates important memos for the Russians. Since most everything is typed before being sent officially, this is a boon to the Russians.
 
For some reason, during that period CIA and State leadership underestimated Russian intelligence, mainly because they didn’t think Russia had the money to conduct this kind of research and experimentation. The US looked at the primitive products (including automobiles) that Russian produced and extrapolated the wrong conclusion. The thesis of this book may be that this was a strategic mistake for which our country is still paying quite a price (i.e. Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election which most probably helped to elect Trump). Enough said. And as far as we know, our government is still underestimating the damage the Russians continue to do to our well-being each day.

Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Deborah Copaken Kogan

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Dave Eggers
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Craven
FRI: My Book World | Curtis Sittenfeld, ​Prep: A Novel
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BURROUGHS'S 'QUEER' EXPLORES PREDATION

2/28/2025

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It’s painful and terrible that youth is over,  and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last.
​Tessa Hadley
Author of Accidents in the Home
Born February 28, 1956
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T. Hadley

MY BOOK WORLD

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Burroughs, William S. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985.

I first read this book before I started keeping records of my reading history, and that 1985 reading reflects not a single annotation—assuming I perused it entirely for pleasure. Not long ago, my partner and I watched the recent film of Queer starring Daniel Craig, and my interest in Burroughs’s novel was rekindled.
 
Bars and hotels play a great role in this short novel. The primary bar related to Mexico City where forty-something American, William Lee, is now living is the Ship Ahoy (the real name of the bar upon which it is based)—which seems particularly significant. Lee uses the bar as one might use a vessel, to search out sexual partners. In that sense he is a predator, particularly when he first sights Gene Allerton, a young American: “His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips” (25).
 
Burroughs painstakingly portrays the exhaustion caused by Lee’s desires for Allerton: “In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals . . . Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocating of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes” (36). All Lee and his bar friends seem to do, with the singlemindedness of the amoeba, is drink, eat, and fuck.
 
Burroughs’s economic use of words is admirable: “He must have slept. Mary and Allerton were gone. Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning” (62). The ellipsis between leaving his friend’s apartment and landing in his own bed is understood. Burroughs does this all throughout, and it is a good lesson for writers of fiction. You need to show (rather than tell) the important things, yes, but not necessarily that which is easily understood or taken for granted.
 
Lee convinces Allerton to take a trip deeper into South America in search of Yage (Ayahuasca), a psychoactive drug used by certain tribes in the region. The recent film departs severely from the book in that it makes this search a more exciting climax than in the book, where it seems to be just one more of Lee’s (and Allerton’s) endless scavenging for that great drug high.

Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | James Ellroy

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Rosa Luxemburg
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Barrett Browning
FRI: My Book World | Eric Haseltine, ​The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat

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GUNN MAKES QUEER COOL

2/21/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct—it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.
​W. H. Auden
Author of The Age of Anxiety
Born February 21, 1907
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W. H. Auden

MY BOOK WORLD 

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Nott, Michael. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life. New York: Farrar, 2024.

As an American, I had never heard of British-born poet, Thom Gunn, but I was intrigued by the cover (dig those shades reflecting the half-naked photographer) and so bought the book. Almost expecting to lose interest, I, instead, read right to the end (not including Notes, egad) about this transplant to San Francisco. I am now looking forward to locating and reading Gunn’s published works with a certain understanding.
 
The key to getting at the core of Gunn’s life may be that his mother committed suicide when he was a child, and he never really recovered from it. He continued to ruminate over her death, and the topic dominated, at times, his poetry. But as one comes to understand, writing fine poetry (to him, not necessarily editors) helped him to understand all the important elements of his life, including this loss.
 
In one sense, Gunn was successful from the start, the Cambridge graduate placing poems in small journals in London as a young man. Though critical success was important to him, he seemed to be one of those rare artists who could analyze his own work and see what was needed—hardly ever following all the invited advice his (critical) readers would bestow upon him. From the beginning there was tension between how much he would reveal about being gay (many times his only subject matter) and being more veiled about it. Until, that is, he moved to the United States. At any rate, Gunn came to define (with the help of W. H. Auden and John Garrett) poetry as “memorable speech” (42). He never lost sight of that goal—leaving and returning to individual poems, sometimes for years, until they seemed memorable.
 
Gunn lived a lively and unconventional life, even for an out gay man in the 1950s and beyond. He met Mike Kitay when they were both in their early twenties, and they remained together—in one way or another—for the rest of Thom’s life (dying at age 74). Through teaching and lecturing events, as well as grants, Gunn cobbled together a decent living and bought a house in San Francisco. There he and Mike established a commune of sorts, calling the gathered people their family. It was a good and healthful atmosphere, in the main, because none of them had strong relations with or support from their families.
 
Nott’s book goes into great detail about Gunn’s drug use. For many years Gunn perhaps kept it under control, mixing but also rotating his heavy use of alcohol, speed, and sometimes heroin. And he managed to keep, until the end, his body in good physical shape—trying to maintain his attractive looks for tricks. But as he retired, giving up both writing and teaching (and purpose), his drug use became much heavier, and an overdose ultimately occurred, ending his life in 2004. As literary biography goes (and it can get a bit into the weeds), this one is very fine, I think. Nott fully researches all aspects of Gunn’s life with great detail and understanding, bringing to light the most important elements of a poet’s life. And yet one also understands the poet as a human being, a very generous and kind man at that.

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Benedetto Croce

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth George
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Steinbeck
FRI: My Book World | William S. Burroughs, ​Queer

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ASK GRAHAM NOW

2/14/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
​​Carl Bernstein
Co-Author of The Final Days
Born February 14, 1944
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C. Bernstein

MY BOOK WORLD

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Norton, Graham. Ask Graham. London: Blake, 2010.

One is not exactly sure how a future talk-show host would evolve from being a Dear Abby columnist for a London newspaper, but here he is, Graham Norton. If you’ve ever watched his show on BBC America, then you are well acquainted with his quick (and searing) wit and yet his genuine concern for others. Those two characteristics and more are featured in this his first book (I’ve decided to read them all, just for a laugh, you see).
 
Honestly, some of these letters see so stupid and ridiculous as to be made up to two thirteen-year-old kids on a slow Saturday night. Dear Graham, my Greek girlfriend makes such a racket when we make love that I can’t look my neighbours in the eye when I pass them in the hall (33). Another writer confesses to finding a date online by lying and saying she’s a sporty type. She winds up having sex with a good-looking fellow; only problem: he likes to have sex in public places. Graham advises: Let’s examine the evidence. You ticked the “sport” box on your online form, but I don’t see how that translates into standing on a fire escaped stuffing your knickers into your handbag (46).
 
Ultimately, Norton’s answers leave a lot of room for his comedic talents to take over, without besmirching the fine advice he’s administering. One person writes in, confessing that her boyfriend’s family are all musicians and how tiresome that becomes after a while. So he answers: I would never encourage anyone to do this, but  I wonder if you might feel a little better if you dribbled the juice from a can of sardines inside their piano before you left for the last time? Just a thought (115).
 
This response of Graham’s speaks for itself:
 
Dear Melissa,
Fat pompous husbands are trying to cheat on their smug wives and you are worried about offending them by saying no? There is a time and a place for etiquette, and trust me this isn’t one of them.
 
My main piece of advice would be to stop accepting invitations to these hideous dinner parties. As for meeting a like-minded man, well, that many not be so easy. Your letter seems strangely negative to me. The only things that come in for any praise are the Dorset scenery and yourself—nothing else seems to come up to the high standards of Melissa. It is all very well to have opinions and strong ones but don’t expect other people to agree or like them. I imagine that the world according to Melissa is quite a hard one to live in.
 
You have two failed marriage in quite a short period of time and you are living alone in Dorset mixing with people you don’t like. Something is wrong with this picture. I know I’m making assumptions based on a short letter but maybe you should try to judge less and open yourself up to new experiences.
 
Make your world bigger not smaller and maybe other people will want to share it (230).

 
Nuff said? The guy has what it takes to dole out advice. Be kind but tell the truth!

​​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Toni Morrison

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Amy Tan
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Hesketh Pearson
FRI: My Book World | Michael Nott, Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life

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STORY  OF THE MASON DIXON LINE

2/7/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book. 
Karen Joy Fowler
Author of ​The Jane Austen Book Club
Born February 7, 1950
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K. J. Fowler

MY BOOK WORLD

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Pynchon, Thomas. Mason and Dixon. New York: Holt, 1997.

My partner and I listened to the 48-hour Audible version of this book narrated by a fascinating British actor, Steven Crossley. He seemed to bring life to each character with an singular idiolect, particularly to the principals, Mason and Dixon. Often written without speech attribution, the dialogue was easier to understand with Crossley’s superior reading ability. I followed along with a hard copy of the book.
 
The story of the two men who created the 233-mile boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania—the Mason Dixon line—became better known for establishing a line between the warring North and South of the USA. The novel also sets up a much fuller picture of the men’s lives as individuals and as partners in various ventures. One of the most fascinating may be their noting of the Transit of Venus multiple times and places throughout the world. Mason is laconic and melancholy, whereas Dixon is more garrulous and freewheeling in his dealings with the world—challenging their friendship and partnership to the nth degree at times—but also setting up a unique and rare lifelong friendship.
 
A long slog of a read, but it is quite worth it, especially if you hear someone else (a professional) read it aloud!

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Sandra Tsing Loh

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Judy Blume
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ricardo Güiraldes
FRI: My Book World | Graham Norton, Ask Graham

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'LOVELY BONES' FASCINATING NOVEL

1/31/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
I write from memory. It would have meant instant death to be caught with a pencil and piece of paper in the [concentration] camp. But I have not forgotten. My mind is like a mine that has yet to be mined out. I remember phrases uttered by Hungarian friends. I remember Polish phrases. I don’t know Hungarian or Polish, but dying words are fixed, like a tape recording.
​Primo Levi
Author of If This Is a Man
Born January 31, 1919
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P. Levi

MY BOOK WORLD

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Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2002.

Author Sebold adopts an odd and unconventional point of view by narrating the book by way of a murdered fourteen-year-old girl. The most astounding aspect of the author’s bold move is that she so totally buys into this POV that it seems quite believable to readers. Young Susie Salmon is on her way home (swimming upstream? obvious catch?) from school when she is enticed by an across-the-street neighbor, Mr. Harvey, to visit his “den” in the middle of a cornfield. The rather intelligent girl knows better, but, as I said, she is ensnared by a master seducer. Mr. Harvey has murdered multiple females, mostly young girls like Susie, usually after he has violated them sexually. How he has gotten away with it for so long is probably a tribute to his wiliness: his obsequious way with other adults, his “shy” act in front of children, girls specifically.
 
Susie’s father right away suspects Mr. Harvey, but he has no proof, and, after a few weeks Mt. Harvey disappears from the neighborhood. Yet, because of Susie’s omniscient view of things (anyone going to heaven has this POV), she knows exactly where everyone in her life is at any given time and what they are thinking. Nice device. No other writer will ever be able to use it again!
 
In an ordinary novel, the comeuppance of the murderer might be paramount in the minds of most readers. What happens to the dastardly Mr. Harvey? I’ll tell you. In a very short scene near the end, readers witness Mr. Harvey attempting to pick up a young woman as they both smoke cigarettes out back of a store. She stalks away, calling him a creep, and surely as an act of God, an icicle drops from the eave of the building and does away with Mr. Harvey. It is all he deserves by way of attention in this novel. Someone else will have to tell his story, if anyone would want to. More miraculous is the ending in which, by way of a bit of magical realism, Susie has one more meeting with a boy she had kissed just before she died. Of course, now, he is twenty-one, which makes things different, but Sebold handles this problem very deftly. In all, a very satisfying novel that investigates a number of issues in modern life besides the perennial problem of creeps picking up and murdering children. 

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Betty Friedan

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | William S. Burroughs
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Annie Bethel Spencer
FRI: My Book World | Thomas Pynchon, ​Mason and Dixon

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'THE HA-HA': SERIOUS STUFF

1/24/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
​Edith Wharton
Author of Old New York
Born January 24, 1862
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E. Wharton

MY BOOK WORLD

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King, Dave. The Ha-Ha: A Novel. New York: Back Bay, 2005.

Nothing like holding a book on your shelves for twenty years before reading it! But it has been worth the wait. A young Howard Kapostash serves sixteen days in Vietnam before he is severely injured—so injured that even with therapy he cannot speak or write any longer. Think about it, a fairly good looking young man is so injured he emerges looking like Quasimodo—even into his forties. Though he does carry a card informing strangers he is of normal intelligence, his life is full of difficulties.

Oh, he does all right with the people he deals with every day: the nuns at the convent where he keeps the grounds mowed and neat, the woman living with him who tends his books and in return is allowed to use his kitchen to maintain her soup business. Sylvia, a former girlfriend from high school, who now asks (demands) a big favor of him. Sylvia is checking herself into a drug rehab place, and she needs a place to leave her nine-year-old son. Pronto. Yes, for an undetermined amount of time, little Ryan will come to live with Howard and the rest of his housemates: Nit and Nat, two hippie types who manage to pay their rent, but barely.
 
Howie and Ryan develop an interesting relationship. Through his usual pantomime, Howard is able to communicate with Ryan and even teaches him a few things about baseball and life. After eight weeks, the two become close, Howard being like a father Ryan has never had in his life, and because Ryan has taught Howard a few things, as well. This becomes the time when Sylvia is well enough to leave rehab. Instead of this reunion of mother and son being a happy time, however, Sylvia sets up a cause-and-effect situation by which Howard is victimized once again. I won’t spoil the ending because it is well worth reading for yourself to find out what it is. No wonder the novel was bestseller in its time!
 
Yes, about the title. At first I thought this book must be about a stand-up comic. But a ha-ha is “a recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier (particularly on one side) while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond from the other side. The name comes from viewers’ surprise when seeing the construction.” (Wikipedia). A photograph or diagram can expand this description if you can locate one. There is a ha-ha at the convent where Howard works, and it becomes a major point in the plot as well as providing a metaphor for Howard’s life.

Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Nien Cheng

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anton Chekhov
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Hazzard
FRI: My Book World | Alice Sebold, ​The Lovely Bones

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A LITTLE MAGIC NEVER HURTS

1/17/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
I’ve had the greatest pleasure always thinking of all those little children who enjoyed my books.
​May Gibbs
Author of Wattle Babies
Born January 17, 1877
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M. Gibbs

MY BOOK WORLD

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Patchett, Ann. The Magician’s Assistant. Orlando: Harcourt, 1997.

Magician Parsifal dies suddenly in Los Angeles, and his assistant wife, Sabine, is instantly burdened with a visit from Parsifal’s family of Alliance, Nebraska. The two members who fly to LA for the service are Parsifal’s mother, Dot, and the magician’s younger sister, Bertie. Sabine is in no mood, especially when they keep calling her husband Guy, a name he gave up long before for adopting his stage name, Parsifal. But Sabine suffers the visitors quietly, taking them to places familiar to Guy/Parsifal, including the rug factory he owns and runs. Oh, and readers learn early that Parsifal is gay and has acquired a lover/partner, Phan. Parsifal marries Sabine largely to protect their financial interests. Readers also learn that most magicians don’t make a living from the work; they have to have a day job, too. Sabine herself is employed by an architecture firm, creating exquisite models for structures the firm is designing. During the short visit, Sabine becomes close to Parsifal’s family members and promises to make a trip to Nebraska soon.
 
In the middle of January Sabine lands, after a shaky flight, in Scottsbluff. She is greeted by Dot and Bertie. Later she meets Kitty, Guy’s older sister, who looks a lot like him. So do her teenage sons, one of whom is also named Guy. At first Sabine is ill at ease but after some long visits with Dot and Kitty, she learns more about her late husband, Guy/Parsifal, mainly that he had a major tussle with the law when young, and the law won. Because he was underage, he spent his time in a reformatory, not in a prison for adults. After serving his sentence, he headed for LA to begin his career as a magician.
 
Back in his heyday, he and Sabine had appeared on the Johnny Carson Show, and someone had made a VHS tape of their appearance. In fact, the family watches it almost daily. They insist that Sabine see it, too. She’s never viewed a recording of their work before, so it is novel to her. Patchett does a masterful job of carefully threading together all the strands of this novel, and I won’t say more because there would have to be some spoilers, and I don’t want to do that, I just don’t.

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | M. K. Hobson

WEDS: A Writer's Wit |August Strindberg
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anya Seton
FRI: My Book World | Dave King, The Ha-Ha: A Novel

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MLK'S NAME INVOKED BY YA NOVEL

1/10/2025

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A WRITER'S WIT
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. 
​Philip Levine
Author of The Simple Truth
Born January 10, 1928
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P. Levine

MY BOOK WORLD

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Stone, Nic. Dear Martin: A Novel. New York: Penguin Random, 2017.

A Black teenage boy about to matriculate at an Ivy League school faces a number of lifechanging challenges. Not only does Justyce have deep feelings for a white Jewish girl who also likes him but he becomes involved in two escalating events with police officers in his city. During one of these incidents, he and his best friend are shot by an officer. To deal with his trials and tribulations, Justyce writes letters to the late Martin Luther King as if he is a living mentor. The author handles with depth and sensitivity all that Justyce must go through to grow as a person. I like how Stone uses “news bulletins” from local TV stations to bring readers up to date on events, as well as an interesting font to distinguish Justyce’s letters to MLK. In dialogue, Stone utilizes a playscript format, eliminating the need for quite so many “they said” situations. Not only a very moving book but a stylishly presented one, as well.

Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Edward St. Aubyn

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jenny Nimmo
THURS: A Writer's Wit | William Kennedy
FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett, ​The Magician's Assistant 

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ACTRESS EXTRAORDINAIRE

12/20/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
​Sandra Cisneros
Author of The House on Mango Street
Born December 20, 1954
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S. Cisneros

MY BOOK WORLD

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Rutherford, Margaret. Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography as Told to Gwen Robyns. London: Wyndham, 1972.

Recently I caught a couple of Rutherford’s Murder films on Turner Classic Movies, in which she plays Agatha Christie’s detective, Ms. Marple. And I became fascinated with the actor, how intricately and honestly she played the part, though the stories are relatively simple. Like a lot of actors/artists she suffered in her personal life early on. At age three her mother died, and an Aunt Besse raised her. It is easy to imagine her life as she was born in 1892, just a few months before my maternal grandmother was born. I usually don’t care for “as told to” books because the prose does sound as if it has been dictated onto a recording and transcribed word for word. But Rutherford’s spoken prose apparently is so eloquent, it doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the written result. Besides, her accounts are terribly interesting.
 
Rutherford celebrated nearly fifty years in the acting business before, because of physical difficulties, she quit, just before her death in 1972—at age eighty. She seemed to make the most of her life no matter what. She went after and earned the career she desired. She traveled for both work and pleasure. She “adopted” adult children after she was married because she had none of her own. At age fifty-four she married fellow actor, Stringer Davis. He died a few months following her death. Perhaps some of her tips to actors are dated, but for the most part probably not. Kindness, consideration of fellow workers, and generosity never seem to go out of style. I paid entirely too much for this used copy, but I do think it has been worth it! If only it were signed!
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY 2025!
​Up Next:
​TUES JAN 7, 2025 : A Writer's Wit | Zora Neale Hurston

WEDS JAN 8, 2025: A Writer's Wit | Robert Littell
THURS JAN 9, 2025: A Writer's Wit | Simone de Beauvoir
FRI JAN 10, 2025: My Book World | Nic Stone, Dear Martin

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ISHERWOOD COMPLEAT

12/13/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
Healing is a constant state. You don’t have to be “fully healed” to give or receive love, to chase after that dream, or to get yourself to that next level.
Lucía González
Author of The Bossy Gallito
​Born December 13, 1957
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L. González

MY BOOK WORLD

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Bucknell, Katherine. Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. New York: Farrar, 2024.

In 2016, I Christopher Isherwood’s entire oeuvre. Why? I admired his work at every level: sophisticated and lyrical vocabulary; his sometimes quirky but lyrical syntax, the variety of genres he tackled, from fiction to nonfiction (history, biography), and play/screenplay writing. My reading included about 4,500 published pages of Isherwood’s journals, all edited by Bucknell. Now she has created an exquisite biography of the author.
 
Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. He kept diaries most of his adult life and drew on them for his published writing, creating narratives more vivid, more revealing, more entertaining than what he documented. He altered the truth in order to make the truth more compelling, and his subtle and mysterious reworking accounts, more than anything else, for the lasting appeal of his writing (5).
 
At first, I thought I would run into a lot of repetition, but I soon discovered that Bucknell’s scholarly work had thoroughly investigated Isherwood’s life from beginning to end—as a biographer should. From Isherwood’s point of view, for example, he only knew his father until the man was killed in WWI, when Isherwood was little more than eleven. Bucknell fills in those blanks for readers: lets us know what a sensitive man the father was and how, as long as he could, he nurtured Christopher’s artistic personality. The hole left in Isherwood’s life was one that would never be filled.
 
Christopher Isherwood was as openly gay as a man could be in his era (b. 1904). By his own accounting he went to bed with over 400 men (from Germany to the UK to the USA). He loved his sexual life. Even when he had a lover/partner, he often had trysts with other men. Yet “[h]e saw from the outset of his career that he must make homosexuality attractive to mainstream audiences if he was to change their view of it, and he worked to do this in all his writing in different ways” (9). I believe he succeeded. Within the glory of the Gay Liberation days of the 1970s, the man was in his sixties, yet he still continued to grow, and he was admired far and wide by younger gay men (my generation) for his pioneering life and work. He was in constant demand for teaching and speaking gigs, which he labored to keep, not only for the remuneration but for the communication it afforded him with others.
 
This tome is one of the most eloquent pieces of literary biography I’ve ever read. If readers wish to learn about one of the finest twentieth-century writers working in English prose, this book is a fine place to begin. 

​Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ford Madox Ford

WEDS: A Writer's Wit |Lucy Worsley
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ronan Farrow
FRI: My Book World | Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography as told to Gwen Robyns

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TOLLIVER LIVES FOREVER

11/22/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT:
The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.
​Marjane Satrapi
Author of 
​Born November 22, 1969

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M. Satrapi

MY BOOK WORLD

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Maupin, Armistead. Michael Tolliver Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

This is a pleasant bookend to the seven-book (I think) series. Michael Tolliver, now in his mid-fifties, is married to a man twenty years his junior. The novel comes full circle, chronicling Michael’s mother’s death (and their prior reconciliation) and the near-death of Anna Madrigal, who Michael considers more his mother than the woman in Florida dying of cancer. Loose ends are also tied up with Mary Ann, who flies in to see Anna in her hospital bed. If you’re really into the series, this book may seem a bit bland, but I do believe it brings a suitable finality to the series’ characters who for so long have inhabited 28 Barbary Lane and environs in San Francisco, the City.

​TUES DEC 3: A Writer's Wit | Michael Musto
WEDS DEC 4: A Writer's Wit |Barbara Amiel
THURS DEC 5: A Writer's Wit | Joan Didion
FRI DEC 6: A Writer's Wit | Jason Reynolds
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!


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THE SAME DAY, ONLY DIFFERENT

11/15/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
I’m a Puerto Rican, gay, Midwestern, educated, former working class, liberal, atheistic, humanist, American, male, ex-Mormon, ex-Catholic, pseudo-Buddhist, teacher, reader, global, and popular culture-informed poet. These are a few of the adjectives that I’ve come to own and that inform my poems.
​Rane Arroyo
Author of Same-Sex Seances: Poems
​Born November 15, 1954
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R. Arroyo

MY BOOK WORLD 

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Cunningham, Michael. Day: A Novel. New York: Random, 2024 (2023).

The novel revolves around one day, yet the same date, in 2019, 2020, and 2021: April 5. Right away one might recognize these years as the before, during, and after of the COVID pandemic and US lockdown. But, of course, the novel is more complex and more flexible than that (the disease serving more as wallpaper than plot substance). Cunningham fluidly explores the dynamics of two couples and their families. Dan and Isabel live with their two children, Nathan and Violet, and Isabel’s younger gay brother, Robbie, age thirty. Only not for long, because Robbie is off to Iceland to live by himself in an (understandably) cold little cabin. The other family is comprised of Garth (brother to Dan) and Chess, and their son—not quite a family because Garth does not live with his wife and child (who now acknowledge that Garth is the son’s father). Both families seem to be coming apart but readers aren’t sure why (perhaps, in part, it is because of the pandemic, invisible but insidious). Cunningham explores their dynamics quietly and assuredly so that by the end readers have a good idea of what has gone on in their lives, before during and after the pandemic. The last few chapters are each mere paragraphs long, providing a soft-landing denouement. Cunningham is the best.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Sepetys

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | President Joe Biden
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Andrew Sean Greer
FRI: My Book World | Armistead Maupin, ​Michael Tolliver Lives

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MYSTERIES OF 'UNTOLD STORIES'

11/8/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.
​Martha Gellhorn
Author of The Face of War
Born November 8, 1908
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M. Gellhorn
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​Alvarez, Julia. The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2024.

I loved the author’s novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. It was quite poignant and enlightening to learn about the culture of the Dominican Republic. In this recent work, readers deepen their knowledge of the DR. Noted author, Alma Cruz inherits a questionable piece of property in her homeland (she selects the sorriest of four plots, her three sisters fighting over the “better” properties). There she encloses the land and forms a cemetery, not for bodies, but for her manuscripts of untold stories—primarily for the characters, whom she feels are as deserving of an eternal home as humans. The characters come alive from DR history, one being dictator Trujillo’s wife, Bienvenida. But there are lesser ones whose lives are just as interesting: Pepito, Manuel, Filomena, and more. It is a book of some complexity, so I know I shall return to it again to gain full advantage of its treasures.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Naomi Wolf

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Whoopi Goldberg
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Roland Martin
FRI: My Book World | Michael 
Cunningham, ​Day: A Novel

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ONE DOCTOR REIMAGINES ELDERHOOD

11/1/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
Contented children are valuable, as is the peace that surrounds them.
​Gordon R. Dickson
Author of ​The Dragon Knight
Born November 1, 1923
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G. Dickson

MY BOOK WORLD

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Aronson, Louise. Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

If this book wasn’t a best-seller in 2019, it should have been. Easy to read and digest, the book explores the entire scale of one’s life: birth, childhood, adulthood, middle-age, young-old, and old-old. Aronson boldly shares her experiences as a doctor who loves working for and with the elderly. She reveals that when people hear the word “old,” they think: wrinkled, bent over, slow moving, bald, and white hair. When people hear the word elder, however, they think respect, leader, experience, power, money, and knowledge.
 
The book isn’t entirely anecdotal; Aronson weaves in lots of data, lots of science, much of it contradicting the current (and for the last fifty years) “wisdom” on how to treat the elderly (mostly by isolation and medicating them as if their bodies were still younger). With the population of elders in this world only growing by the day, she calls for a new way of thinking about the old. New ways would treat the elderly as individuals, as if their lives still mattered, not just their bodies. Physicians don’t mind keeping the old bodies alive; in fact, they almost insist on it. Yet they don’t necessarily want to handle the rest of the old body: the brain, the emotions such as loneliness, fear, and anxiety.
 
I read this while a loved one of mine (an elderly) was in the hospital and now rehab. The author’s words helped tide me over, so that I might make better decisions for him. Again, well worth the time. Aronson is a fine writer, an excellent physician, but most of all, a caring human being. I wish she were my doctor.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ida Tarbell

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Maria Shriver
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Guy Gavriel Kay
FRI: My Book World | Julia Alvarez, ​The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel


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NOT NECESSARILY HIS BEST

10/25/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
Zadie Smith
Author of White Teeth
Born October 25, 1975
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Z. Smith

MY BOOK WORLD

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Sedaris, David. The Best of Me. New York: Little, Brown, 2020.

Funny how authors view their own oeuvre. I’ve always been fond of Sedaris’s work, but these selections, though engaging and humorous in places, did not really seem like his “best.” His best usually contains little sentiment, yet much bawdiness and irreverence. The collection seemed too “nice.” A friend of mine, however, thought the collection “vulgar,” so there you go.

​Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Edward P. J. Corbett

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Irma S. Rombauer
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Katherine Paterson
FRI: My Book World | Louise Aronson, ​Elderhood: Redefining Aging,
 Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

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    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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