Summer Reads
Happy summer! I’ve been traveling, reading, watching tv, going to movies and plays. Here’s some I’ve enjoyed. Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan. I’m that reader who always pre-orders McEwan. He provides an interesting read even if I don’t like or don’t believe in a character or situation. (i.e., Atonement, Saturday.) This newly published book may
(...)Books: reading and grieving
We read to learn, we read for pleasure, we read to escape. I found it hard to read anything other than newspapers in the days after my mother’s death. After a week or so, while I was still out in sunny hot Scottsdale, I got back to books. Here’s some I enjoyed: they took me
(...)Books: Recent reads
Most recently I read and enjoyed Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, a modern Hamlet narrated by a full-term fetus. Trudy, the pregnant mother, has dismissed her poet husband John from his childhood home, a crumbling mansion in a fashionable part of London. Taking his place? His brother Claude. Together, Trudy and Claude conspire to murder John Cairncross,
(...)Books: Fall Reading
Summer is over, winter is upon us: reading is a constant. One I loved — every single page — is Ian McEwan’s The Children Act. Let’s review my feelings for Mr. McEwan’s work. I thoroughly enjoyed his last two efforts, the spy spoof Sweet Tooth and the environmental satire Solar. Both are wise and well
(...)Reading: McEwan’s “Sweet Tooth”
“My encounters with books I regard very much as my encounters with other phenomena of life or thought. All encounters are configurate, not isolate.” — Henry Miller And so it goes with Ian McEwan’s dozen or so novels, linked not only by their author and his smart prose but also by the extremes I’ve experienced
(...)Books: “Solar†by Ian McEwan
Unexpected book grief. Ian McEwan’s “Solar†is that rare thing: a wickedly funny satire about science featuring a wholly unlikeable main character. I loved every page of it. When we first meet Michael Beard he’s 53 and fat, a Nobel-prize winning physicist riding the high-fee, high-calorie lecture circuit. His (fifth!) marriage is in shambles and
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