Category: Reading
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Recommended Reading: Gold Fame Citrus
This week I’m recommending Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, which is a bit of a dystopia and a bit of a post-apocalypse and a bit of magical realism and is the latest book I’ve read set in the American Southwest. In the near future, drought has rendered the Southwestern United States nearly uninhabitable. A mountain-high sea dune…
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Reading journal: Mid-February
Reading has slowed down, although I have one new recommendation to post shortly. I reread The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin with my son, which I think was a bit too old for him, but I still love it. I also reread Dracula on audio. I last read Dracula as a pre-teen or youngish teen. I don’t remember exactly when,…
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Recommended Reading: Lost Canyon
This week I’m recommending Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr. This was the latest in my kick of reading fiction set in the Southwest. Indeed, I only picked it up because I thought it was set in Nevada (it’s actually set in the Sierra Nevada mountains). I could definitely keep on with this theme until I run out of…
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Reading journal: January wrap-up
Not full reviews or even necessarily recommendations, just some notes on what I’ve been reading. I will never read all the dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction out there, but I keep trying. This month I read a very early apocalypse story by Jack London: The Scarlet Plague (free to read online). This short story feels like an ur-story…
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Recommended Reading: Daughter of Fortune
Recommended this week: Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende. Set against the backdrop of the mad rush to California in search of gold, Allende reveals history through the eyes of the people who lived it but don’t usually get to tell the story: women and non-whites. She creates a diverse and three-dimensional world that feels both…
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Recommended Reading: The Water Knife
This week I’m recommending The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. It’s a thriller wrapped up in a dystopia, a realistic and frightening vision of the havoc climate change might wreak on the American Southwest. In the near future, climate change has brought about drought and constant dust storms in the Southwest, resulting in the collapse of several…
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A foundational reading list…
I promise that this is the absolute last reading list I will post. Ha ha, no. What if you are starting your reading completely from scratch? What should you read to have a good foundation on which your future reading will rest? What are those books that sparked legions of imitators and inserted themselves permanently…
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Reading journal: Ringing in 2016
This year, I’ve decided to post snippets from my ongoing reading journal that aren’t full reviews, just thoughts about what I’m reading and what I want to read. This will possibly be terribly dull; I’ll let you decide. Here’s what I’ve been reading since the start of the year — a lot of short books!…
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Recommended reading: The Expendable Man
This week I’m recommending The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, a crime noir classic recently reissued by New York Review Books. A young doctor driving from California to a family wedding in Phoenix, Arizona, sees a teenage girl hitchhiking on a desert road and stops to pick her up, setting in motion a chain of events that…
Shannon Turlington 