a gentle madness

I jealously guard my free time. Presented with the choice of browsing the hundreds of books littering my house or tackling the long list of menial chores needing attention, I choose the books. And a cup of coffee better than I deserve. Moving between the bar and the bookshelf, moving between work [...]

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Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go;
But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great.
-Walt Whitman
I regularly scan two or three newspapers per [...]

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The Stack includes new chunks of paper like Andrzej Stasiuk’s Nine. Read the Wikipedia entry here.
From the jacket:
Pawel, a young businessman in debt to loan sharks, wakes up one April morning in a sea of debris, broken glass, ripped upholstery, and clothes spilling out of the wardrobe. He turns to two friends for help: [...]

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Two of my favorite people have decided to read books together. Not the same copy of a book, but copies of the same book at the same time. Even when they are apart they are reading together. I love this idea, despite my belief that reading is a solitary activity. Talking [...]

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…read the New York Times Book Review, especially the essay by Joe Queenan. Baaad books. Bad. We read them, we love them.
What we gonna do next is read this article in the Washington Post about Grundy, Virginia’s efforts to lure Walmart. Both pages will probably require you to register to be [...]

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Where we discuss:

The catharsis of 4/16
The Walmart effect
Summer comes too early
Remodel update
Shelfari

Huh. Thought this was a commentary about books, coffee and all that. Blaahgh about that. But I can’t write about the books I read without writing about the things that drive me to the books I read. Take Flight, Sherman [...]

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Drinking cafe La Minita. Reading James Ellroy’s Cold Six Thousand. Yeah, I’m still reading that. In the meantime I finished Flight by Sherman Alexie and Promise Not To Tell, by Jennifer McMahon. You can read a NY Times review of Flight here. Or read the Harper Collins reading guide to [...]

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