A Series of Unfortunate Events teaches us that the random, absurd cruelty of the world and all the people in it cannot always smother the fires (is that a bad pun) inside of us.
Read moreTop Ten Books 10: The French Lieutenant's Woman
While The French Lieutenant’s Woman is not the first book I’ve thrown across a room, it’s certainly one I’ve thrown the hardest.
Read moreTop Ten Books 9: Dorothy Parker Complete Poems
Maybe it really is cheating to include my favorite Dorothy Parker poems on my list of Top Ten Books. But they come from a book, a book that taught me words for a struggle I wasn’t sure how to describe…
Read moreTop Ten Books 8: All Our Wrong Todays
The rest of All Our Wrong Today’s beauty comes from the full-throttle embrace and love the story has for its topics, for human nature, for time, weirdly enough for architecture, and for this general sense that it’s our responsibility to make the world we want to have. Because we’re not supposed to have it. We’re supposed to make it.
Read moreTop Ten Books 7: Normal People
That is the story nestled inside the intense, moving prose of Normal People. A relationship spanning years. A love story, real enough to see the pain. A beautiful train wreck, witnessed near enough to feel the fire. Normal people, and everything that entails.
Read moreTop Ten Books 6! Hyperion.
If you’re able to put your fears aside, or else relish in them, appreciate Hyperion for what I said at the beginning. It’s a story of stories. The story of stories.
Read moreTop Ten Books 5- The Fish in my Life
In which Justin X. M. Corriss and Murray Hoyt reflect, through the page, on the slips, the falls, and the entanglements beside the irreplaceable experiences, the time spent with companions, and the things you only tell others after a few drinks.
Read moreWriting With Music!
The advantage here is that you’re enjoying yourself and, at least subconsciously, thinking about the topics you assign to the songs.
Read moreAnna Karenina
Anna Karenina’s characters are players on the stage of life, ships at sea swept along by forces larger than themselves in a storm only the skillful survive… But skillful does not mean good, and good does not promise happiness.
Read moreLast Call
Last Call helps, and it helps because it focuses on an industry where people are the center, creation is the fun, and, nowadays, survival is the goal. But, at some point, it’ll be about living again.
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