Let America Be America Again - Langston Hughes

This short book of poetry (21 pages) is a stirring collection of Hughes poems about America.  He notes the disconnection of the land of the free not being free for blacks, but remains optimistic that America can be what it dreams.  Langston Hughes is one of America's great poets and this short collection reflects his wonderful skills as a writer.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

There are so many great books, but this one stands out among them for me.  Calvino has a spectacular mind and an ability to express himself in the most fascinating ways.  He seems to define creativity in this book.   This short book encompasses a vast array of thoughts about how we see and experience the world.  By focusing on different visions of a city, in this case, Venice, the author playfully examines the interaction of humans with cities.  Marco Polo sits in deep discussions with Kublai Khan...how can this book not intrigue the reader?  This book belongs on my desert island list.

Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata

One of Japan's greatest writers tells a complex tale in this classic book.  In a very simple and elegant style, deep emotions and complex human relationships are uncovered.  The Japanese tea ceremony is a focal point and provides a contrast between a deeply calm, reflective space and the many ways humans disturb that seemingly simple state.  Deceptively short in length, this book tells a deeply complex story with many surprises for the reader.

Just Kids - Patti Smith

This book surprised me.  I liked it much more than I expected to.  Patti Smith is a wonderful writer and tells us about a fascinating period in her life.  This autobiographical novel depicts the development of two artists, her and Robert Mapplethorpe, as they seek fame and expression in New York City in the 1970s.  It is a very touching story of friendship and mutual support for artist creativity.  The book also covers the craziness of two young people dedicated to their art while trying to make it in a harsh city.  Filled with many famous people, the book remains true to itself by remaining the tale of two kids holding to their visions. 

Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner

I don't know that I have ever read anything by Stegner that wasn't beautifully written and engaging.  This book is no exception.  A simple tale of the frienship of two couples over a period of time, Stegner as usual, is able to create a story that stimulates the reader with his great writing style and ability to create great characters.  I enjoyed this book from beginning to end and found myself smiling at passages expertly composed and drawing into the book.  Another fine example of what made Stegner one of America's great writers.

A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 - Adobe Press

This educational, "Classroom in a Book" published by Adobe to train people new to Lightroom 3 is excellent.  It includes a CD with photos to use in each of 10 lessons.  The exercises are easy to follow while providing a very thorough demonstration of all of the features of Lightroom 3.  For anyone serious about photography, Lightroom 3 is a must, and this book is a great way to learn the complexities and great tools of this software.

Cross Channel - Julian Barnes

A great collection of short stories on interactions between the British and French covering various times in history.  The stories are wildly unique, curious, and very personal.  The writing is superb and immensely entertaining and thought-provoking.

People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks

I might as well say, right from the jump: it wasn't my usual kind of job. I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit labratory, where the climate is controlled and everything I need is right at hand. It's true I have developed a reputation as someone who can work effectively out of the lab, when I have to, when the museums don't want to pay the travel insurance on a piece, or when private collectors don't want anyone to know exactly what it is that they own.

The Lemon Table - Julian Barnes

The Lemon Table is a collection of short stories about aging.  Barnes is inventive with these stories and they are a pleasure to read.  Both amusing and thought-provoking, it is a great collection by a great writer.  These stories are so rich in the breadth of emotion and originality that they often feel like individual novels more than short stories.

Why Suicide? - Eric Marcus

This book is laid out in a question and answer format and covers a broad range of questions about suicide.  I found it very informative and is a book well worth reading, especially by anyone touched by suicide.  I was surprised how little I understood some aspects of suicide and some of the myths that I gave some creedence.

By Nightfall - Michael Cunnigham

Touched by Sucide - Michael Myers

How does one explain the inexplicable? Make sense of the senseless? Speak about the unspeakable? When someone you know and love dies by suicide, these and many more questions--an avalance of questions--take over your life.  Suicide is a death like no other. It is deliberate and chosen. Is it rational? Rarely. Desparate? Always. Ignited by internal pain, suffering and absense of hope? Almost always. And it always leaves behind a legacy of mystery and devastation. Suicide touches you and you are never the same.                                                                                                                              This is an excellent book for those touched by suicide.  In a very straight-forward style it presents a lots of information, dispels many myths, and provides comfort for those surviving.  I like the casual format with a lot of first person stories.

Horoscopes for the Dead - Billy Collins

Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this one, but it didn't really work for me.  Sure, Billy is a good poet, and I have enjoyed some of his earlier books.  This one, however, seemed like he ran out of things to say and just got cuter and sillier while he discussed more meaningless little things.

Love and War in the Apennines - Eric Newby

We were captured off the east coast of Sicily on the morning of the twelth of August, 1942, about four miles out in the Bay of Catania. It was a beautiful morning. As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.


A remarkable story of the author's capture and escape during WWII.  His adventures around Italy, evading both the Nazi's and the Italian fascists, is a tale of adventure and the humanity of the Italian people who assisted him.

Edible Stories - Mark Kurlansky

You know you are on the edge when you live in Seattle, with nothing more to the continent than Puget Sound. The sound looks like a white-gray sheet of aluminum, often stained slighthly darker by ripples of rain, as though the rain had gotten the water wet. ...If it were true, as was once believed, that you could fall off the edge of the world and be devoured by a giant turtle, Seattle would be a place where that might happen.

I loved this funny and inventive novel told in sixteen parts.  Each part is a stand-alone chapter based on a different edible item.  Original and well-written, it is hard to imagine anyone not enjoying this book.

Edward Weston - Manfred Heiting

Edward understood thoughts and concepts which dwell on simple mystical levels. His own work- direct and honest as it is -  leaped from a deep intuition and belief in forces beyond the real and the factual.

This is a great small compilation of Weston's work in the Taschen Icon series.  It is small in size, but the quality is excellent, especially considering the inexpensive price.  An article on Weston written by Ansel Adams provides insight into this great and ground-breaking photographer.

Lola Alvarez Bravo - Elizabeth Ferrer

Lola Alvarez Bravo is often over-shadowed by her more famous photographer husband, Luis.  This excellent book displays the span of her photographic work and shows her to be a worthy photographic.  The text is well written and provides an informative biography.  She lived in an exciting time for the arts in Mexico.  Her friendship with Frida Khalo is described in the text and many intriguing pictures of Frida are included in this book.  For any fan of photography, this is compelling body of work showing a unique vision and documenting a time of creative expression in Mexico.

The Niagra River - Kay Ryan

Small Crimes - Ann Menebroker

Ilse Bing: Photography Through the Looking Glass - Larisa Dryansky

Reading the OED - Ammon Shea

Passage to India - E. M. Forster

Siegfried - Harry Mulisch

Venice - Peter Ackroyd

The Photoshop Darkroom - Harold & Phyllis Davis

Venices - Paul Morand

My Antonia - Willa Cather

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford - Wendell Berry

The Prospector - J.M.G. Le Clezio

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve - Adrienne Rich

Waiting for Rain, Music

Burn me some music Send my roots rain I'm swept
dry from the inside Hard winds rack my core

A struggle at the roots of the mind Whoever said
It would go on and on like this

Straphanger swaying inside a runaway car
palming a notebook scribbled in

contraband calligraphy against the war
poetry wages against itself

The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell

Amsterdam is on its knees; our shipyards are idle; our manufactories silent; our granaries plundered; The Hague is a stage of prancing marionettes tweaked by Paris; Prussian jackals and Austrian wolves laugh at our borders: and Jesus in heaven, since the bird-shoot at Kamperduin we are left a maritime nation with no navy. The British seized the Cape, Coromandel, and Ceylon without so much as a kiss-my-arse, and that Java itself is their next fattened Christmas goose is plain as day!

This is a very engaging historical novel set in the late 1700s and early 1800s in Japan.  It is a complex story with many levels within the fantastic tale.  Mitchell is a superb writer who displays wonderful talent and an ability to dive into the time period convincingly.  This book is everything you can hope for in a historical novel: intriguing characters, an exotic time and place, and unfolding mysteries.

Inherently Unequal - Lawrence Goldstone

The descent of the United States into enforced segregation, into a nation where human beings could be tortured and horribly murdered without trial, is a story profoundly tragic and profoundly American. And the Supreme Court was a central player in the tale.

If the Court's complicity in the subversion of equal rights had been due to rogue justices, or was an aberration of jurisprudence, Americans of the current day might merely shake their heads, deplore a shameful episode in their history, and congratulate themselves that the United States was no longer that nation. If, however, the Court's actions were not aberrant at all, but simply examples of ongoing practice, in which justices subordinate the role that Hamilton espoused for them to the exigencies of popular politics--or worse, their own personal beliefs and prejudices--the equal rights decisions of the latter decades of the nineteenth century become expressions of issues deeper, more disturbing. For then the United States Supreme Court would have, in a very real sense, eschewed the dispassion that the Founders thought so vital and become merely a third political arm of government.

Subtitled "The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court 1865-1903" is an excellent historical account of disturbing action and non-action by our highest court. Containing a lot of legal analysis, the book is compelling and hard to put down. I was attracted to the book by actions of the current court and found the similarities I suspected, personal politics taking precedence over sound legal decisions. The author is quite a scholar and presents historical insights into both the Supreme Court and America's rejection of equal rights for all its citizens.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lolita in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

A perverse love story within one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It is hard to imagine another writer creating such a masterful book centered around an incestuous relationship. An amazing piece of writing that should be read by anyone enjoys literature. Nabokov is able to play with words in dazzling ways and challenge one's thinking at the same time. An artistic exploration with humor and sensuousness, love and perversity.

Love - Peter Nadas

This book didn't work for me. I debated finishing it and only did so because it was short. The author was highly praised, but I found him tedious.

Once Upon The River Love - Andrei Makine

Why Belmondo?

He arrived at the moment when the discontinuity between the promised future and our own present was on the brink of making us irremediably schizophrenic. When in the name of our messianic project the fishermen were preparing to leave not one single fish in the seas, and the loggers to transform the taiga into a desert of ice. While back in the Kremlin one old man was decorating another and anointing him "three times Hero of Socialist Labor" and "four times Hero of the Soviet Union," and there was no space left on the shrunken chest of the decorated person for all those gold stars...

When Belmondo took Siberia by storm, all that was part of it. The Kremlin; the hundred and fifty weaving looms; vodka as the sole means to combat the schizophrenic rupture between the future and the present. Not to mention the disk of the setting sun trapped in the barbed wire...

Chronicle In Stone - Ismail Kadare

It was a strange city, and seemed to have been cast up in the valley one winter's night like some prehistoric creature that was now clawing its way up the mountainside. Everything in the city was old and made of stone, from the streets and fountains to the roofs of the sprawling age-old houses covered with grey slates like gigantic scales. It was hard to believe that under this powerful carapace the tender flesh of life survived and reproduced.

The traveller seeing it for the first time was tempted to compare it to something, but soon found that impossible, for the city rejected all comparisons. In fact, it looked like nothing else. It could no more support comparison than it could bear the rain, hail, rainbows, or multi-colored foreign flags that vanished from its roof-tops as quickly as they had come, ephemeral and unreal as the city was eternal and concrete.

Napoleon's Buttons - Le Couteur & Burreson

We decided to write this book to tell the stories of the fascinating connections between chemical structures and historical episodes, to uncover how seemingly unrelated events have depended on similar chemical structures, and to understand the extent to which the development of society had depended on the chemistry of certain compounds. The idea that momentous events may depend on something as small as a molecule- a group of two or more atoms held together in a definite arrangement- offers a novel approach to understanding the growth of human civilization.

An interesting take on history, especially if you enjoy science. From the tin of Napoleon's army uniform buttons which may have disintegrated in cold weather to the spice wars, history is detailed as it relates to specific compounds. I thought the authors did a nice balancing job in keeping the book both entertaining and educational. Enjoyable to read.

Human Chain - Seamus Heaney

A Herbal

Everywhere plants

Flourish among graves,

Sinking their roots

In all the dynasties Of the dead.

...

Seamus Heaney is one of the world's great poets. This book certainly displays his great talent. However, it didn't move me as much as some of his other poetry. He still shows his ability to express so much in a few words.

Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcena

Do not mistake me; I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less. This approaching end is not necessarily immediate; I still retire each night with hope to see the morning. Within those absolute limits of which I was just now speaking I can defend my position step by step, and even regain a few inches of lost ground. I have nevertheless reached the age where life, for every man, is accepted defeat. To say that my days are numbered signifies nothing; they always were, and are so for us all. But uncertainty as the place, the time, and the manner, which keeps us from distinguishing the goal toward which we continually advance, diminishes for me with the progress of my fatal malady....Already portions of my life are like dismantled rooms of a palace too vast for an impoverished owner to occupy in its entirety.

This book amazed me. Wonderful, imaginative writing that caused me to pause and think on almost every page. This is a book to put on my "read again" list. Written as a letter from a dying Hadrian to his successor, it is filled both with history, sage wisdom, and deep reflections on life. Yourcenar recreates ancient Rome in a novel that accurately recreates a most interesting time in ancient Rome. Beautifully written, almost like an epic poem.

Swan - Mary Oliver

April

I wanted to speak at length about

the happiness of my body and the

delight of my mind for it was

April, night, a

full moon and--

but something in myself or maybe

from somewhere other said: not too

many words, please, in the

muddy shallows the

frogs are singing.

.

Mary Oliver's poems about nature are beautiful--soothing, soulful reading. The poems in this book are as natural as the subjects. Gentle and meditative, Oliver is a very gifted writer. The perfect book to read under a tree.

Periodic Table - Primo Levi

He had a slow, foot-slogging imagination: he lived in dreams like all of us, but his dreams were sensible; they were obtuse, possible, contiguous to reality, not romantic, not cosmic. He did not experience my tormented oscillation between the heaven (of a scholastic or sports success, a new friendship, a rudimentary and fleeting love) and the hell (of a failing grade, a remorse, a brutal revelation of an inferiority which each time seemed eternal, definitive). His goals were always attainable. He dreamed of promotion and studied with patience things that did not interest him....

We had no doubts: we would be chemists, but our expectations and hopes were quite different. Enrico asked chemistry, quite reasonably, for the tools to earn his living and have a secure life. I asked for something entirely different; for me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai.

A charming and intelligent book by the great Italian writer and Nobel prize winner. The book is a biography, primarily of the writer's early life. Becoming a chemist, he is intrigued by elements of the periodic table, using them to create chapters for this book. The book has a little bit of everything from unusual facts to fascinating tales. Beautifully written, it is a pleasure to read.

King Lear - William Shakespeare

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: and we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sets of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon. (5.3.9)

Danger on Peaks - Gary Snyder

This present moment

that lives on

to become

long ago

This new collection of poems by Gary Snyder is fabulous. He is as enjoyable to read as the first time I read Turtle Island forty years ago. Lots of insights and smiles here. It is simply comforting having him be a part of my journey through life.

hundreds of white-fronted geese

from nowhere

spill the wind from their wings

wobbling and sideslipping down

The Lost - Daniel Mendelsohn

At night, I think about these things. I'm pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can now learn and which is now gone forever. What I do know now is this: there's so much you don't really see, preoccupied as you are with the business of living; so much you never really notice, until suddenly, for whatever reason--you happen to look like someone long dead; you decide, suddenly, that it's important to let your children know where they came from--you need the information that people you once knew always had to give you, if only you'd asked. But by the time you think to ask, it's too late.

An amazing story of searching for his past is told in this well written non-fiction story by Mendelsohn. With an interest in his family tree discovered in his childhood, the author documents his efforts to discover six family members who disappeared along with six million other members of the Jewish family. The investigation involves a compelling mystery that moves to several continents. I loved the story and was quite moved at times by the touching family stories and the horrors of the Nazis. A lot of details about the people met along the way that sometimes got in the way of the story.

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?—To die,—to sleep,—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die,—to sleep;—
To sleep: perchance to dream:—ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time

The River Sea - Marshall De Bruhl

Throughout the five centuries since its discovery, explorers, visionaries, soldiers of fortune,, men of God, slavers and the enslaved, scientists, men of good will and men of ill will, and men of appalling cruelty and rapacity have been drawn to the river and its vast basin.

Whether searching for El Dorado, the fabled land of gold and riches, seeking to spread God's word, hoping to exploit or develop the region's natural resources, or travelling out of wanderlust or idle curiosity, many thousands of the brave, the adventurous, and not a few of the foolhardy have come to the Amazon.

The introduction from which the quote was taken, piqued my interest in this new book. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations. In only 217 pages, the book covers the entire history of the exploration and development of the Amazon. I enjoyed the first half of the book with the early explorers much more than the later chapters detailing the exploitation of the people and resources. The tales are often dreadful, as I guess one might expect of jungle exploration. While the book is very well written, I lost interest in chapters about development of the rubber industry and another chapter entirely on an array of modern exploitation.

The Cloud Atlas - Liam Callanan

I'M A WANTED MAN.

That's hardly enough to distinguish me around here, of course, I've heard it said that a percentage of Alaska's population is always fleeing something--the authorities, spouses, children, civilization. By comparison, I have it easy. It's just a couple of old priests hunting me, and I know them both. I could take them if it came to that, and it won't.

I'll be honest up front. They're coming after me for the most mundane of reasons. The only thing slightly extraordinary is that they're coming at all. For a while, I thought they would just forget about me, and that I'd be able to live out my days like most fugitives here: not entirely free from want, but free from those that want you. But no, first one sent a letter and then the other: these initial letters just suggestions, of course. Then a second round, with a request. And the third round, with an order. Come home.

I have to admit that I confused this book with another by David Mitchell with the same title and released the same year. I enjoyed reading it, in spite of it being an over-ambitious first novel. The main character is a young soldier sent to Alaska during WW II to investigate balloon bombs launched by the Japanese. Alaska in the 1940s and the unusual bombs are enough to make for an interesting tale. The author introduces some other characters which weren't believable for me. The book takes off into some mystical directions that weren't woven into the story in a way that worked. Still, many seem to like this book and it is an interesting adventure in an unusual time and place involving a fascinating piece of WW II history.