by Steven Hyden

Steven Hyden is younger than me, and from Wisconsin rather than New York; but his experience growing up with classic rock radio was the same as mine. This book is a wonderful celebration of that noble genre that will never die! Long live rock!

Seriously, the book starts really strong; and I can’t resist any writing with such deep cuts about the Stones and Dylan. Hyden is obviously an essay writer; each chapter is an essay on a theme. Some are better than others, depending how much you care about the topic (e.g. Springsteen? meh).

It’s very hard to imagine there was once a time when classic rock didn’t exist yet, and terrifying to think there will come a day when it doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve thought about that a lot myself… will anyone care about the Beatles decades, centuries from now? Will all this be lost, that which feels so timeless to us now?

Long live rock, be it dead or alive!

by Danzy Senna

I don’t know why I picked this up. The sample obviously misled me.

The main character, Jane, is – guess what! A writer! Of fiction! Who teaches at a southern California university – just like our author! Authors of the world, please, please, do a modicum of research… write about a protagonist who is engaged in one of the many OTHER fine occupations out there? There’s, oh, I don’t know… mechanical engineer… night nurse… ad exec… barista… web content manager… software developer… insurance salesman… the list really goes on and on.

The plot revolves around lies that Jane tells and gets caught up in. It’s one of those stories where you can’t really understand why the person started with all the lying in the first place. Her life really wasn’t that bad.

by Keivn Fedarko

When it was good, it was very good. But it had a lot of sidetracks, and not just their hike.

Pete & Kevin embark on a cross-Canyon hike with no preparation. At first I was afraid we were in for another Bill Bryson schtick, where we were expected to laugh at stupidity – like not even TRYING ON your loaded pack before the trip begins. That gets me every time. They put on their packs and are like, “Wow, this is heavy.” I want to knock them upside the head.

It wasn’t like that; although Mistakes Were Made, they were not funny. Spoiler, Pete & Kevin survive – because they know when to quit.

The sidetracks into other people’s stories were a little dull to me. I wanted to stay with one story, Pete, Kevin, & the Grand Canyon. I have not yet been to Grand Canyon. This book inspired in me what to do & what not to do.

by Johanna Spyri

(re-re-read)

So it’s a little over the top. If Johanna Spyri could have dialed it back just a little, it could have been the kind of classic suited for adults as well as children. What am I saying? This IS a classic and I’m trying to improve it.

Heidi is a little wood sprite. The world is enchanted to her; everything is alive, every tree and mountain and goat is an individual.

“[S]he made personal acquaintance with [the goats] all in turn, for they were like separate individuals to her, each single goat having a particular way of behavior of its own.” I can certainly vouch for the fact that every goat is an individual.

According to grandfather, the big bird of prey who lives on top of the mountain and croaks and screams is saying, “If you would separate and each go your own way and come up here and live on a height as I do, it would be better for you!” How I dream of living alone high in an Alpine hut, spending my time smoking my pipe and looking down over the valley.

by Ian McGilchrist

The word “life-changing” gets thrown around a lot, by folks including me. But I feel after reading THE MASTER & HIS EMISSARY, and now this opus, that blinders have been lifted from me. I see my left hemisphere for what it is. I just wish I knew what to do with this newfound perspective.

Be it known this two-volume 600+ page work is partly responsible for me only being up to Book Corner 7 at the end of March. That and my new tendency to abandon books with wild abandon after significant investment. I’ve abandoned so many books halfway through lately.

by Percival Everett

SPOILERS AHEAD. I was really disappointed with this, after how great ERASURE was. I couldn’t believe he dropped the parenthood bomb. Can writers really not think of any better way to give their narrative a “point” than to do a great big parenthood reveal? So boring! Plus, the beauty of the original HUCKLEBERRY FINN was how Huck came to see Jim as human through his own experience and moral reasoning. Not because he found out that Jim was his father! That changes his moral epiphany altogether. It becomes all about genetics. Parenthood. Race.

It was also tiresome how there was not single good white character in the whole book, living or dead.

James wonders towards the end whether white people are fighting to free the slaves merely out of “guilt.” What better reason would there be? What more or less does he want?

by Joan Didion

I don’t know why I read this. It’s about the year after Joan Didion’s husband died and her adult daughter hovered near death in various ICU’s. The “magical thinking” was semi-conscious thinking like “I can’t give away his shoes; if he comes back, he’ll need shoes.” I have not yet lost my spouse and I don’t know what to say about it; I guess, thanx for the tip as to how horrible it’s going to be.

by Sally Rooney

This is not my kind of book – very talky-thinky. Dense pages with no paragraph breaks consisting entirely of people talking or thinking about their feelings.

I don’t like Sally Rooney, and this book reenforced that. I had read one book, NORMAL PEOPLE, and liked exactly one half of it. Now I have double the sample size. I don’t like her women and I don’t like her sex scenes. I preferred the young woman in the first half of NORMAL and I prefer sex scenes where people keep their socks on and not everything is wonderful.

It dragged in the middle. I thought, I get it, I get it, the “neurodivergent” guy is the most well-adjusted character in the book. I don’t buy Ivan as neurodivergent, FYI, if that’s what she had in mind, which it may not be; it may just be what readers are projecting onto him. He was a skinny guy that was really into chess. But he was as talky-thinky as anyone else when you got right down to it.

I loathed Naomi. I came to hate any scene where she was even mentioned, let alone appeared in. Why was everyone around Peter acting as if this were a perfectly appropriate relationship for him? To quote Woody Allen’s alien scene in STARDUST MEMORIES, “Hey look, I’m a super intelligent being, by your standards I have an IQ of 1600, and I cant’ even understand what [Peter] expected out of that relationship with [Naomi].”

Positives:

I thought it was really interesting about how concerned the characters were with what other people would think. Margaret says that the net you’re caught in, the net of other people, you can’t get out of it, because life IS the net. And Peter couldn’t get past what other people would about him being in a weird “throuple.” I think characters grown up in the US would not have these attitudes. If they had twinges of self-consciousness they’d shrug them off – Who cares what people think? I’m an adult, he/she/they are adults, this is our life to choose. Most of the rest of the world is very different; apparently even first-world places like Ireland.

It was actually beautiful how she conveyed the grief of the two brothers. Whenever the narration came around back to their father, in any way, whichever brother’s perspective she may have been inhabiting, you really felt the loss and the struggle he was going through; like real grief, large swathes of (narrative) time might go by without giving a thought to the loss, but a reminder would crash it down again.

by Peter Ames Carlin

Kind of dull – like the band. And I say that with R.E.M. firmly in my top 5 of favorite artists. They just never struck me as very interesting as people. The book does not disabuse me of said notion. Or maybe I’m not being fair – it’s not that they wouldn’t be very interesting people to get to know; but just not to get to know by reading about them.

Regarding the work, the book is pretty much all-out fanboy. Almost everything they make is great.

by Brette Warshaw

What I learned:

• Stout and porter were only invented in the 1700s. Guinness was the first stout.
• Broccolini was invented in the 1990s and first called “Asparation”. Because it was like “asparagus.” Um, yeah.
• The first rum distillery in North America went up in the 1600s on none other than… Staten Island.