I’m always reading but I don’t always have time to post a blog about what I’ve read. Travel, work, a massive head cold, my sweet dog’s last days on earth: life.
I lapped up Linda Rosenkrantz’ Talk in part because I’d always wanted to do what she achieved. Rosenkrantz recorded conversations with her friends over a year, transcribed those and created a dialogue-only novel. It’s set in 1965 (though it feels more contemporary) and is a record of three brainy Manhattanites’ summer in the then sleepy Hamptons. They drink too much, gossip, stay out too late, cook, sleep around, second-guess their love affairs. Recently reissued (thank you) as a classic by New York 
Review of Books.
Next I spent a good many days savoring Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. Here’s the story: Pip Tyler is a college graduate with a boatload of debt, working for a fraud, living in an Oakland squat. She’s been raised almost off-grid by a difficult mother who won’t tell Pip where she came from. Pip is a smart, wry young woman, but she doesn’t know who she is. That’s the engine of the plot. Franzen’s cast of characters span the human spectrum: a 
murderer, his teenage accomplice, an heiress and the college boy she seduces, investigative journalists, a disabled writer, a schizophrenic house mate. It will take all 563 pages to unite Pip with her father, with rich detours along the way.
Not my favorite Franzen (that would be Freedom) but very satisfying.
For a work assignment I needed to read Ron Balson’s Saving Sophie, a global thriller that starts with a brazen heist in downtown Chicago. It’s not my kind of read but it held my interest: its bad guys are convincing and there’s 
never a dull moment. Too, I liked his descriptions of Chicago.
To soften the blow of losing our intrepid Cassady (when he was good he was very very good, and when he was bad, well, it was legendary) our niece Lucy brought us the beautifully composed graphic memoir Plum Dog, by Emma Chichester Clark. It’s a London-based diary told from the point of view of a whoosell (whippet/Jack Russell/poodle.) Every page is a delight: funny, real 
and wonderfully illustrated.
I’ve been reading Meghan Daum’s essays and book reviews (The New Yorker, The Atlantic) in anticipation of her Nov. 7 talk during the Chicago Humanities Festival. She’s an uncomfortable truth teller: “People who weren’t there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton 
in Vogue.â€
Finally, Chicago Ideas Week. The offerings can overwhelm. A thoughtful publicist (thank you Katie Keidan) curated a list of four she thought I’d enjoy. I chose “What Would Shakespeare Tweet?†Four speakers: a cochlear-implant surgeon/30 million words advocate, a lexicographer (what a job!), a linguist/journalist, a word-tone researcher and finally, the inventor of Dathrocki, a language in Game of Thrones. Ahhh: nerd heaven.