Stories

A Year of Living Organizationally. Or–Ann Patchett

March 31, 2021

When the pandemic shutdown started more than a year ago now, I hoped to come out of it with two new novels and a well-organized house. It turns out the novels are the easy part. The decluttering is taking forever–not least because in the middle of it, I sat down to read a personal history piece […]

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Movie Review: The Mauritanian – 2

March 11, 2021

Critics praise The Mauritanian but call it a throwback, its cast better than the script. Audiences like it more than the critics, maybe because it’s the type of film that went missing from theatres even before the lockdown: an intelligent drama for adults. The film tells the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was held without […]

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Movie Review: The Mauritanian – 1

March 8, 2021

It’s a bad reason for watching a film: I was charmed by Jody Foster’s blurted acceptance of her best supporting actress award at the Golden Globes for The Mauritanian. “Are you kidding me?” There’s also the fact my husband went to Guantánamo on a media tour in August, 2002, eleven days after the Mauritanian in question, […]

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How Do We Really Spend Our Days?

November 24, 2020

I’ve been thinking lately about how we spend our days. Not what we write about on social media: the highlight reel, heavily edited. Instead I’m thinking about the minute-by-minute unfolding of our lives from the time we fumble off the alarm in the morning to the time we set it at night, and how that […]

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Advice to the Lovelorn, 1940s Style

November 3, 2020

Working through the boxes in our attic, doing a purge, I came across several letters written in the mid-1940s by my mother’s Aunt Peggie. I only have one side of the correspondence, but from the sounds of it, my mother often wrote letters to her aunt complaining about the lack of good men. Also about […]

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From Soup to Nuts Cake: Recipes from the 1960s

October 26, 2020

I think the cookbook comes from the early Sixties, but there’s no date inside. The Moffat cookbook, given away when people bought new stoves. It belonged to my mother, who died Before, as I think of it now. Long Before, but I’m doing a household purge that starts with a couple of boxes of her stuff that […]

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Review(s): Janet Malcolm’s Personal History and A Book I Won’t Read

July 23, 2020

I was cleaning behind a bookcase the other day and came across an old New Yorker dated October 29, 2018. Well, it’s a heavy bookcase and it doesn’t get moved that often, she said defensively. In it was an article by staff writer Janet Malcolm, a personal history called Six Glimpses of the Past in which she […]

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Book Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney

July 16, 2020

In a series of posts, I’ve written about two modern novels, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and Normal People by Sally Rooney. The series starts here. After finishing The Nickel Boys, I turned back to Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Normal People. I’d put it aside after something about it bothered me; I didn’t know what. This […]

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Book Review: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

July 10, 2020

Let me say first of all that Colson Whitehead’s latest novel is brilliant: the story of boys locked up in a juvenile facility, mainly because they’re Black or inconvenient or both.  Protagonist Elwood Curtis in The Nickel Boys is a finely-realized, decent and intelligent kid, nerdy when the word has just been invented, although the type is […]

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Book(s) Review: Bush Runner and The Mirror & The Light

June 26, 2020

Reading distractedly these days, jumping from one book to another, I’ve been hearing echoes. One pair of books that talked to one another as I read them at the same time: Bush Runner by Mark Bourrie and The Mirror and the Light, the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell.  Both circle around […]

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Plague Blog — 20

June 17, 2020

When I started a plague blog three months ago, I was aware that if nothing much happened, the blog might feel pointless. Writing online demands constant hits of drama, or at least brattiness, and I can’t be bothered being a brat. Too much work.  Yet over the past three months, I’ve seen more than enough […]

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