Entries Tagged as 'Books'

Excerpts from The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Post 1

What do I say here: please read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Just so. This novel is heartbreaking and beautiful and—dare I say it—perfect. I offer my sincerest thanks to Claire for having carried the book from San Francisco and to Syd for having lent it to Claire. I will offer little [...]


Cut Straight to the Heart

Post 2

Packed away in some box in the basement of my childhood home is a well-worn copy of The Paper Crane by Molly Bang. I loved this book as a child and could rightly claim that I still do. The story was classic and darling and, perhaps more importantly, I have always loved art in cut [...]


The Darkness Inside

Post 3

I have been reading again the beautiful work of José Saramago. His prose is quite dense, featuring unbelievably long sentences and no special delineation of dialogue, each thought punctuated only by a comma. But still, without doubt, the narrative and soul of the work warrants the careful reading required. My present Saramago project, All the [...]


Three Mentions of Recent Success

Post 4

I ate four apple cider doughnuts on an achingly autumn afternoon with my father Federico and my mother Melanie and my sister Nicole and my brother-in-law Mark. Not pictured above are the wedding I attended the day before in Gloucester for Amy and Don or the striking colors of my first return to October in [...]


Waiting

Post 5

If ever I love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love. I finished last night [...]


The Only One Who Can See

Post 6

I was intrigued to see the title Blindness in the list of Apple movie trailers. I had an optimistic guess as to the literary source for the film and click through to the trailer confirmed my hope. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago. In this [...]


Lassoed Links

Post 7

I have a deeply significant matter to discuss but I have not yet decided how to do so, or if I should at all. To break my recent silence, resulting from the aforementioned hesitation, I would like to share a selection of recent links that I found interesting. First, a new stick figure slideshow cleverly [...]