Book Report for September 2024
Letter No. 99: You may detect a self-conscious, apologetic tone.
This month’s book report seems…slight? Dr Essai has been traveling much of late, plus scribbling a magazine piece and another essay for a journalism site, and this has cut into his discretionary reading time. These things happen. The unread volumes on his shelves remonstrate nightly. It is not pleasant, but must be endured.
And hey, the Joseph Kanon novel was more than 500 pages…oh, never mind.
Completed
- The Good American, Joseph Kanon. Another excellent work from Kanon, this one set in Berlin, 1945, after Germany has surrendered. A literary murder mystery notable for how vividly Kanon portrays how miserable life must have been for surviving Germans at war’s end. Steven Soderbergh filmed it with George Clooney and Cate Blanchette
- The Best American Essays 2002, Stephen Jay Gould (ed.). Best of show were Barbara Ehrenreich’s furious “Welcome to Cancerland”; Jonathan Franzen’s candid and heartbreaking “My Father’s Brain”; Cullen Murphy’s brief for studying the mundane, “Out of the Ordinary”; and especially Danielle Ofri’s extraordinary medical essay, “Merced.”
In progress
- The Notebook: A History of Writing and Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen
- The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, Tore Skeie
- Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez
Purchased
- The Iliad, Emily Wilson (tr.)
- The Odyssey, Emily Wilson (tr.)
- The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen
- Prophet Song, Paul Lynch
A reminder, dear Jogglers, that should you use a link to purchase a book through Bookshop.org, the good doctor receives a modest commission.
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