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reading journals
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If your interest is piqued by any of Richard's journal excerpts below, click on a year.
1987-1993 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
1987-1993 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Recent Excerpts (Rev. 8/10/2019)
Burns, Anna. Milkman. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2018.
This winner of the UK’s Man Booker Prize is a stunning read. From the outset, one is struck by this Irish writer’s Joycean style or even point of view. The novel is ostensibly set in Northern Ireland of the 1970s. Her stream-of-consciousness prose includes the practice of keeping her characters anonymous. The narrator calls herself middle sister, one of several female siblings, and refers to them as First Sisterand so forth. Other characters include Milkman, the real milkman, and Somebody McSomebody. Such a practice paints a society of strict norms, in which everyone is judged by whom they associate with or don’t associate with, why one isn’t married to a particular man by a certain age. The practice also keeps the reader at a distance, viewing this particular time period of strife with as much objectivity as possible.
Chee, Alexander. Edinburgh: A Novel. New York: Houghton, 2001.
The shame that an abused child experiences is difficult to write of, let alone portray by way of characters in a novel, but Chee, a master wordsmith, seems to come at everything by way of a side door, abstrusely, which is all the better, for readers are able to view abuse without having to wallow in it or be subject to its pain. One can feel empathy for the abused, as well as the abuser
Fieseler, Robert W. Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the
Rise of Gay Liberation. New York: Norton, 2018.
On June 24, 1973, manager of the Up Stairs Lounge, in New Orleans, a gay bar, ejected a disgruntled and damaged individual for fighting, and he returned with a seven-ounce can of lighter fluid. Dispersing the entire container of accelerant, he set the entrance on fire which spread almost instantaneously, trapping scores of gay men and a few women upstairs. Because the establishment was cursed with a number of unchecked fire hazards, the blaze trapped and killed, in the end, thirty-two individuals, three of whom were never identified their bodies were so badly charred.
Journalist Fieseler does a persuasive job of tracing the history of this event, developing the characters of its key players, limns a portrait of the arsonist and his personal difficulties, as well bringing to light the tepid response of the New Orleans community, including a police department more comfortable taunting gay men and treating them like second-class citizens than attempting to conduct an investigation of the fire
Houston, Pam. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. New York: Norton,
2019.
“I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often meant the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories” (78). Having studied with Pam, I can tell you she calls one’s paying attention to these details “glimmers”: that conversation you overhear at the market, the accident you see on the way to your doctor’s appointment. Your doctor’s appointment. Everywhere you look throughout your day, if you’re alive, you should be paying attention to these glimmers. Of course, they can come from your past, as well, but something from the past can be a bit dusty, so, once again, your mind must return to the concrete details. Houston says, “I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way” (79).
Obama, Michelle. Becoming. New York: Crown, 2018.
Michelle Robinson Obama never holds back when discussing issues like racism, how, from the time she is a child, she must work harder, climb higher and faster, to prove to white people that she is just as good as they. The journey must be exhausting, knowing inside that you are as smart or smarter than white men and women but being put down in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. This book is a work of grace under pressure, how she becomes the person she wants to become, the wife and mother she wants to become, and how she becomes her own version of the First Lady, the first black First Lady, and it succeeds greatly in sharing with readers her love of life.