Fantastic Sunday night show at the Egg in Albany. Sam and the band sounded terrific, and I loved hearing the new songs as well as updated arrangements of the classics to fit the five-piece band on this tour. I’ve been a fan since The Creek Drank the Cradle but this is my first time seeing them live and I’m very glad I did!
This is one of many “work books” that I keep in my office, but it’s far from a dry legal tome. Stevenson does a masterful job weaving the story of his legal representation of a wrongfully convicted man with chapters about some of the systemic issues in our criminal and family legal systems. Importantly, it’s deeply humanizing and client-centered, which is the North Star for public defense representation. A recommended read for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
The first time I read V. was on a trip to California 16 years ago, so I thought it was fitting to revisit it on my most recent trip to the Golden State. This was the book that got me into Pynchon and it was a rewarding re-read. It’s stunningly self-assured and ambitious for a debut novel, and while it doesn’t rise to the highest heights of his later works the template is set: underachieving protagonists who get in over their heads, discursive conspiracies, prescient social satire, and the goofiest character names in the biz. Great stuff.
An insightful critique of late ‘90s/‘00s pop culture and the myriad ways in which it was infused with a pervasive misogyny that continues to shape American society today. Much of Gilbert’s focus is rightfully on the negative impacts the culture of tabloids, Girls Gone Wild, and reality TV had on women who came of age during the new millennium, but I’ve given a lot of thought about the ways that pop culture overtly or subtly shaped my worldview in my late teens and twenties. Highly recommend this to my fellow elder millennials, especially the men.
The first third or so of this slim novel had me in its grips — ostensibly a story about a group of swimmers at a public pool whose routines are upended by a mysterious occurrence. It’s clear early on that this framing is a parable for the “real” subject of the book (I won’t spoil it here) and had Otsuka stuck with that framing I think I would have enjoyed it more. Instead, the subtext becomes text and the rest of the book dispenses with metaphor in favor of the literal (and by some accounts that I read, virtually a memoir of Otsuka’s own experiences). Admittedly, the subject is one that hits close to home for me, but my critiques stem more from the structure than an aversion to the subject. By contrast, Kazuo Ishiguro’s THE BURIED GIANT addresses similar themes and was one of my favorite novels of the 2010s. Ultimately not for me, though on the strength of the first part of the book I’m into exploring more of Otsuka’s work.
This is Barth’s first two novels in a single volume, so I guess I have to count it as one book read. THE SOT-WEED FACTOR is a top five novel for me, so I was psyched to dig deeper in Barth’s work. Ultimately, both books hew closer to mid-century modernist literature than the post-modernism Barth would come to master. Which is fine! But they didn’t quite have the frisson I was looking for. THE FLOATING OPERA was the more interesting of the two; THE END OF THE ROAD felt like a lesser, more goyish Philip Roth novel. Glad I checked them out, but probably won’t revisit them.