And there, languishing in my DNF folder on my Kindle, was what certainly would have been my Best Book of 2015, though only probably second-best book of 2014. (Dept. of Speculation, thanks for asking): My…
Posts Published by Christa
Love-hate letter to a diary
Here are the circumstances of reading Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: I am in a mega-reading rut. Nothing looks good. Everything takes too long. I’m tired of buying new books, but I’ve already read at least half…
Blah-blah Blunderer
Patricia Highsmith’s old-school suspense novel The Blunderer opens with the perfect crime: A thoroughly up-to-here husband buys a movie ticket, seeks out a familiar face to acknowledge his presence, then sneaks out the back door of…
You can have your furies
Funny story: Sometime in mid-December I published a list of the Top 5 books I’d read in the past year, which felt like a lie because I was up to my neck in Lauren Groff’s…
Read, then moon
I could have sworn I had read Joan Didion’s novel Play it as it Lays, but a reference to it recently in pop culture went sailing and I felt like a fraud. Must actually read…
Review Stew: Midwest kitchens, New York rockers and things to quit
Wherein I dump a bunch of reviews into a single post in order to declutter the Unreviewed Lit Nook of my brain. M Train by Patti Smith This ain’t no Just Kids, Smith’s award-winner about…
Scott on Scott
I’m going through a bit of a Scott Jurek phase right now that started with reading Born to Run and was helped along when he recently distance-ran the shit out of the Appalachian Trail. It helps…
Feel Something
You know how sometimes you’re reading a book and a moody art dude goes into his studio and begins a complicated choreography that starts with covering his genitals in paint, segues into self-penetration with a…
And then and then and then …
So much depends upon a reconfigured dinner party, now, at the last minute, to be hosted by the wife of a British diplomat believed to be up for an ambassadorship in Ireland, if. But, Ireland?!…
Hot Off the Grill
A few blocks away from the 1950s-style diner where our hero has drawn every coffee pot and customer butt-crack is a place she assumes is an abandoned Chinese restaurant. Margaret, an art student has scrounged…
Dear diary …
The truth is, I haven’t even finished The Folded Clock: A Diary yet. I believe I’m on the last pages and I’m heel skidding on the finale. On Tuesday I read The New Yorker instead. Partly…
How I came to be a …
At some point in the past five years I stopped interviewing myself in my head when I run. I stopped practicing the words to describe my fictitious comeback, although “comeback” is the wrong word because…