I purchased this book after hearing Brian Koppelman recommend it on the Ringer’s JFK Rewatchables episode. I’d heard of it before, but safe to say it was never on my radar. It sat on my shelf for a few months and as I was winding down the final chapters of Moby-Dick I walked over and stared at the shelf and picked it up. It’s hard to argue with a first page that starts like this: ...

I listened to this very brief audiobook (about 3 hours) in 15-30 minute increments over a few days, while falling asleep. This is a short audiobook and performed very well by its author. Carrie Fisher was such a treasure. One of the early figures in my life in a lot of ways, via Leia. I have a framed portrait of Leia (artist Mike Mitchell, via Mondo) in my living room and think of her a bit as a patron saint. I had no idea for years that another figure of early childhood, Aggie Cromwell of Halloweentown, was her mother, Debbie Reynolds. ...

I first read Giovanni’s Room four years ago. I remember gripping it tightly the whole time, bent over and racing through it. Not 200 pages, Baldwin moves through the story so incisively that it really does feel like the drop of a guillotine. I do not remember detesting David, our narrator, so much on my first read. Depressed moody people may be able to relate to either being or wanting to be in an empty home with a big bottle of wine and looking moodily out of windows (certain I can), but David does begin to feel like an alien. In his early experience with Joey, he vanishes out of insecurity and fear. That’s understandable—coming of age, a much different era than we’re in now. Even in our current era, I can remember first realizing I’d fallen for a boy in one of my high school classes, and that was terrifying. ...

Sometimes a classic is a classic for a reason. I remember picking up Moby-Dick sometime in elementary or maybe middle school and bouncing off of it instantly. Hardly surprising. I doubt I thought about the book at all between then and a few months ago, reading that Cormac McCarthy drew some inspiration for Blood Meridian from Melville’s work, and apparently this was McCarthy’s favorite novel. Not difficult to see why, or to see the parallels. ...

I read this for our July Small Press Book Club, pairing it with Math for the Self-Crippling, with this book being suggested by Math’s author, Ursula Villarreal-Moura. I often feel unqualified to evaluate poetry, and that feeling persists. Though, the visual layout decisions and the sense these give appeal to me. Perhaps more to me than to the others in my club. Poem Cardinals, A Novena enters to bracketed segments, weaving across the page before eventually resolving outside of those brackets. My favorite of the layout experiments is on page 34, which features a blank page tailed by a footnote that can only be explained as a typographic panic attack. ...

I’ve read Tom Sawyer several times over the years, physically and audibly. This is my second time listening to the audiobook as read by Nick Offerman, who seems born to read Twain. While I think years ago I’d have given this five stars, I find it is not my favorite Twain by a long shot. It is fun, and funny, but nothing to me compared to Connecticut Yankee. Anyway, I listened to this while falling asleep at night and it was perfect for that. I cannot recommend more strongly Offerman’s readings of Twain. ...

My one comic per year, this time Hickman’s Secret Wars. By complete chance, the same guy who wrote my one-comic last year, House of X/Powers of X. I enjoyed this quite a bit. Read to prepare for Avengers: Doomsday which I probably will not see til it comes out on streaming; I’m not excited for the film. Lots of characters I’ve never heard of. I enjoyed the art and the story. I have very little knowledge of Dr. Doom, but what little I had apparently comes from this comic. God Emperor Doom. Lots of fun. ...

Disclaimer: If you read this book, I suggest not paying for it. OSC’s views should not be rewarded. Visit your local library. I remember checking this book out from the library, probably I was in 7th or 8th grade. I’d just finished Ender’s Game and enjoyed that. I was probably unprepared for how different Speaker for the Dead is, and yet it was immediately preferable to me. I love the immense empathy and search for understanding within, and the warmth that is so often there. ...

Another Guibert. I expected this one to speak a little more to me, as it is the intersection of photography and writing. Little parts of it, especially the brief entry “Contact Sheet” (see note for p75 below) did, and others were worth reading, but maybe had quieter voices. The premise of using words as a method of constituting photographs (the ghost images) in the reader’s mind is interesting; it is what all fiction writing at the least is, of a sort. Stephen King calls writing telepathy. Sometimes the writer strings words together that are outlandish and have nothing to do with anything else, purely because the stringing of them evokes a certain emotion or sensory experience. Other times it is visual description to the nth degree, forcing the image the writer beholds into the reader’s mind (willingly or not). Guibert falls somewhere in the middle. Some of the photographs and paintings referenced speak more to me in Guibert’s words than they do on a computer screen, and some of his words I badly wish I could see printed as a photo. At some point soon I will mindfully go through his photobook The Only Face and I’m curious if I will discover any of these spoken photos in those pages. ...

This is a tiny little book which I bought after seeing it mentioned a few times in Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers. There, Guibert states that he spent the last 50 pages reading through tears. I did not have the same emotional reaction, maybe because the story is not quite what I was expecting. However, it is still affecting. Difficult not to consider analogues between the childhood phase of the book and the current condition of the United States. ...