April 14, 2018 at 3:49 pm (Books, Links, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended, The Guardian, Women Writers)
Tags: advice, biographies, book lists, diary, England, English writers, environment, history, memoir, memories, nonfiction, Obama, Saturday, Stanford, The Guardian, Vietnam, war literature, World War I
There is very little overlap been self’s reading list and the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time by The Guardian.
Below, books on The Guardian’s list that self has read:
2. The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
5. Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama
9. Dispatches, by Michael Herr
15. The Double Helix, by James D. Watson
20. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
23. The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and EB White
33. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child-care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock
42. Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain (for a course on the Literature of World War I, taught by Prof. Albert Guerard at Stanford)
44. Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves (for a course on the Literature of World War I, taught by Prof. Albert Guerard at Stanford)
65. Roget’s Thesaurus
83. A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon
92. The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys, via Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Pepys’ life
Leave a Comment
February 20, 2018 at 5:28 am (Books, Recommended)
Tags: memoir, Mondays, reading lists
p. 177: “. . . whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, ‘The feeling that our choices don’t matter.’ “
Leave a Comment
February 6, 2018 at 5:54 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs)
Tags: essay, inspiration, literature of medicine, medicine, memoir, Mondays, New York Review of Books, review, sayings, wisdom
You will notice, dear blog reader, that all the magazines self has been quoting this week are three years old. That is because 2015 is the last year she had much leisure time. She thinks it’s a very good sign that she saved all these past issues of New York Review of Books. Like she knew, she’d be getting back to them one day. Even if that day was three years later.
Moving on.
Oliver Sacks is no longer with us. Nevertheless, his ouevre remains. Jerome Groopman, in his review of Oliver Sacks’s memoir On the Move: A Life, quotes Sacks’s description of himself:
of “vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.” A talented student drew a contrast with Ivan Ilyich, who was passionless and shaped his behavior to strictly conform to others’ expectations. Tolstoy judged Ilyich’s life as “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
Which is why self is sharing this photo (taken at the San Carlos Auto Pride carwash):
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
November 4, 2017 at 9:25 pm (Books, Memoirs, Recommended)
Tags: medicine, memoir, nonfiction, reading lists, Saturday
Wonder what the woman patient in this chapter would think of Henry Marsh’s book? Doubt the hospital administration would have told her:
We tried three times to clip the aneurysm but the first two clips were flawed and the head surgeon ended up throwing one of the flawed clips across the operating room. You’re damn lucky.
Anyhoo, the day after the operation, when Marsh visits the patient, she has a huge black eye and a swollen forehead. Marsh may not have appeared sufficiently concerned about the patient’s appearance because her husband, who happens to be there, glares at Marsh angrily.
Marsh explains his nonchalance thus:
- Perhaps I should have expressed more sympathy but after the near-disaster of the operation I found it difficult to take her minor post-operative problems seriously.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
October 15, 2017 at 6:46 pm (Lists, Sundays, Surprises, Women Writers)
Tags: dreams, memoir, nonfiction, teaching, UCLA Extension
I.
A woman is hungry. She searches her house and all she discovers is a piece of stale white toast. She takes a bite and discovers it is soaking wet.
II.
A woman’s dryer is full of water. Her first thought is to read the dryer instructions on removing water. She squats down but cannot see/read the instructions around the control button. Suddenly, a stranger is standing right behind her. The woman realizes all she has on are “mini tiny shorts.” She feels naked.
III.
A woman is in “a poorly lit place” having a manicure. She realizes she left her purse in the car. She retrieves her purse, but she finds that the way to the manicure place is now uphill, and she is wearing high platform shoes. The manicurist tells the woman she owes $400.
IV.
A woman is with her son by a pool. It is time for some scheduled pool activity to begin but the boy stays outside the pool, playing and teasing his mother, “for what seems like hours.” The woman begins crying hard.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
July 2, 2017 at 5:05 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: art, California, causes, exhibits, history, Literary Magazines, memoir, nonfiction, photography, reading lists, San Francisco
Exhibition Catalogue, SFMOMA: Jim Goldberg’s “Raised By Wolves,” Photographs of Seattle’s Street Children (1995)
A Parent of a Runaway, Quoted in the “Raised by Wolves” Exhibition Catalogue
Leave a Comment
July 2, 2017 at 3:34 am (Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Plays, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: indulgences, memoir, reading lists, Saturday, Shakespeare, summer
Leave a Comment
May 22, 2017 at 8:14 am (Books, Family, Memoirs, Women Writers)
Tags: history, memoir, memories, Mondays, South-East Asia, Vietnam, Vietnam War
Early 1960s. The “war” was the Vietnam War, which pitted the North, where Moi’s parents were from, against the South, to where they fled:
How long does it take for a mother to read Alone in the World and The Story of Perrine to her child? My mother read to me almost every evening, because my parents went out only three or four times a year, and never had guests. It was wartime, but that doesn’t explain it — war had only just begun and nobody imagined at the time that it would last some 15 years and that we’d face shortages of everything, especially freedom, the basic freedom to move around as we chose.
This sense of frugality was something my parents were born with, just as others live with a heart murmur or an irregular heartbeat. It was the region of their birth, the North, that had triggered this simmering anxiety.
At bedtime, my mother would decide on a number of pages, but I would beg her to carry on, and she was always happy to continue the story of Rémi the abandoned child or of Perrine Paindavoine, an orphan searching for her family . . . From one episode to the next, in those days before TV series, I traveled from one family to another, and from town to town, in the comfort of knowing I would fall asleep sated with emotions.
2 Comments
April 27, 2017 at 7:40 am (Books, Conversations, Family, Filipino Writers, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sayings, Women Writers)
Tags: memoir, nonfiction
The friend is Kathleen J. Burkhalter, and her memoir is called The Greatest of These Is Love: Selections From Kathleen’s Celebration of Daily Life, edited by David Bell
- It takes courage to begin writing because to write is to reveal. When you live in a critical environment, it is hard to write authentically. Even to begin writing is an act of bravery. But on the other hand, writing is a form of liberation. Like singers who sing, or composers who make music, or artists who paint, the use of one’s talent is an essential element of being happy.
— p. 116, The Greatest of These Is Love, vol. III
Kathleen Joaquin Burkhalter was born in Augusta, Georgia and grew up in Baguio, Mountain Province, in the Philippines. Her mother was from plantation families in Pampanga and Marinduque, and her father was from a colonial Georgia family. Kathleen would proudly say, “I am 100% Filipino and 100% American.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
December 25, 2016 at 7:55 am (Books, Conversations, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: crime, memoir, nonfiction, reading lists, Sundays, Truman Capote
Self is full speed ahead on this book.
The excerpt below is about Alvin Dewey, lead detective on the Clutter murders.
He’s stepped into a coffee shop and gets heckled:
“I got a houseful of women who won’t go to the bathroom alone.”
Dewey had become accustomed to this brand of abuse; it was a routine part of his existence. He swallowed the second cup of coffee, smiled.
“Hell, I’m not cracking jokes. I mean it. Why don’t you arrest somebody? That’s what you ‘re paid for.”
“Hush your meanness,” said Mrs. Hartman. “We’re all in the same boat. Alvin’s doing as good as he can.”
The ranch hand waited until his quarry had reached the door, then fired a farewell volley: “If you ever run for sheriff again, just forget my vote, because you ain’t gonna get it.”
Self teaches memoir writing. The trickiest part of it is that remembered dialogue is far from accurate.
But, in this case, the “remembered dialogue” is by a third party who wasn’t even there.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
« Older entries
