Recent reading
| Number of books read and reviewed each year |
|---|
| 1995* |
(28)
|
| 1996 |
(47)
|
| 1997 |
(74)
|
| 1998 |
(61)
|
| 1999 |
(62)
|
| 2000 |
(27)
|
| 2001 |
(51)
|
| 2002 |
(60)
|
| 2003 |
(37)
|
| 2004 |
(36)
|
| 2005 |
(32)
|
| 2006 |
(46)
|
| 2007 |
(109)
|
| 2008 |
(78)
|
| 2009 |
(65)
|
| 2010 |
(68)
|
| 2011 |
(98)
|
| 2012 |
(129)
|
| 2013 |
(114)
|
| 2014 |
(101)
|
| 2015 |
(88)
|
| 2016 |
(82)
|
| 2017 |
(76)
|
| 2018 |
(67)
|
| 2019 |
(95)
|
| 2020 |
(90)
|
| 2021 |
(85)
|
| 2022 |
(101)
|
| 2023 |
(124)
|
| 2024 |
(155)
|
| 2025 |
(133)
|
| 2026 |
(56)
|
| * Partial year |
[Finished 20 August 2026] Set in a near-future dystopian America, it started out feeling insufficient, but as the book continued, it felt better realized. The pointing out that America has long used separating children from their parents as a form of violence (whether with enslaved people or Native American boarding schools or the border separation by the Trump regime—the last when I learned of it sent me into a month-long depression) was a notable element of the author’s note at the book’s end.
[Finished 14 August 2026] The writing here was painfully mediocre (it had the same flat voice of other amateur autobiographies I’ve read) and the content had to be filtered through the understanding that Seraphine was writing his account with an agenda—to establish that he was a key creative wellspring for the band Chicago, but even with those caveats, it’s an interesting history of the band and the travails and triumphs along the way. One only wishes it were better written and the obvious bias was better managed.
[Finished 14 August 2026] I grew up in an area that had a mixed gang presence, some aligned with the “People” other with the “Folk.” Even so, as someone who was in the AP track at my high school, I had minimal contact with gangs (the only class where I would even have any contact at all was gym) and most of what I knew came from third- and fourth-hand conversations with my peers who were not much more educated than myself.
This book, with its in-depth history of the group which was essentially the founder of the People faction (and talks about the group that was the origin of the Folk faction), along with a look into the inner workings of what began as a neighborhood gang and ended up with delving in and out of respectability along the way. Overall, a wonderfully nuanced look at what the group was, is and how it changed along the way.
[Finished 13 August 2026] My copy, and, from what I see on Goodreads, most editions, barely acknowledge the translator, Peter Whigham, but it was clear reading the poems that this really should have been titled
Whigham’s Poems of Catullus given the liberties Whigham takes with the form and contents of the poems. The one poem I have memorized in Latin,
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
is relatively faithfully translated, but even there, Whigham deviates slightly from the literal meaning, rendering
excrucior as “torn in two” rather than “tormented,” “tortured” or “crucified.”
That said, it was still a pleasant experience, but not quite what I would have expected to find in the Penguin Classics series.
[Finished 13 August 2026] I “read” this book as an audio book, a gift from my ex-wife to listen to while on vacation. I saved it for the long drive I had from Bjargtangar to Akureyri after the eclipse and as a consequence, I’ve ended up with weird spatial memories of the contents of the book with different passages corresponding to different aspects of the Icelandic landscape at night.
The book has a somewhat familiar approach of mixing information with bits of humor which works reasonably well, although I think that I would have preferred the book on paper rather than audio if only to help keep track of the various Greek-derived rhetorical terms.
[Finished 10 August 2026] When I read
Lit, I was blown away by Karr’s writing and I ended up picking this up at a Catholic literature conference I attended at Notre Dame. Karr was scheduled to give a presentation, but thanks to a back injury was unable to attend in person so she presented by video.
Sadly, in the intervening time, I witnessed an interaction on Twitter which soured me on Karr. One of her students at Syracuse raised issues over her paternalist and borderline racist (maybe not so borderline) treatment of him in class. She responded by denying the behavior and attacking him personally, and other students who had been in the class and witnessed this rose to his defense.
A good response would have been to apologize and promise to do better. She pretty much chose the worst possible response. So with that, I found myself approaching this book with the ick factor that comes from knowing that the author is an art monster.
Overall, I didn’t find a lot to appreciate in the book, maybe because of how I’ve come to perceive Karr, maybe because of the book itself, which seemed like it didn’t have much to offer that I haven’t gleaned from many author interviews I’ve listened to over the past couple of decades.
[Finished 9 August 2026] I’m not sure how I discovered Natalie Moore, but I ended up taking two of her books with me on vacation. This one is a mix of memoir and sociological reporting on the characteristics of the Black South Side experience which helped provide a lot of additional context to some things which I knew a little about but not enough. Perhaps the most interesting/surprising thing to me is discovering that the Beverly neighborhood on the South Side managed to avoid the white flight that accompanied Black in-migration in other neighborhoods. I wonder whether they followed the path laid out by Oak Park. It’s hard to say because Moore barely acknowledges the existence of the suburbs in her book.
[Finished 7 August 2026] A fun little collection of games that can act as generative exercises. In so far as I would have a gripe, it’s that an already slight volume feels padded with unnecessary extras, but even with that, it feels like a book I will return to.
[Finished 6 August 2026] The framing of the book from the title hinted at something that would have been more interesting than what actually came about here, which was ultimately a kind of conventional biography forced into the format of the questions. I kind of feel like if Bakewell had been courageous enough to abandon chronology to instead give Montaigne’s life in thematic slices, it could have been a better book. That said, I did find myself thinking that I would like to read more Montaigne (I’ve read at least one of the essays, but not enough to be deep into him).
[Finished 2 August 2026] My moment of embarrassment: I had it somehow in my head that this was a novel and only after I finished the second “chapter” did I start to wonder how the two narrative fit together and then I thought to glance at the back cover which described the book as a story collection and oops.