Tag: book-review

Tom Robbins and the flexibility to endure

When I got the news yesterday that novelist Tom Robbins died last weekend (at age 92; how could he have been that old?), my memory swooped like the long-extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō back, back, back to 1981 or ’82 or so, when I first encountered Robbins’ writings in the form of his novel Still Life With Woodpecker.

A journalism student at the time and steeped in the dreary, staid, humorless learnings of newswriting, I read Still Life as a guilty pleasure. (I’m grateful to my girlfriend at the time who lent me her copy of this book, the perfect antidote to my gloomy, humorless J-school student outlook.) The way Robbins played with the language — even when he was over the top with it, which was often — enthralled me, and for a long time, throughout my college years and beyond, I tried on his writing style to see how it would fit.

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Friday Five: my year in books

Because everyone needs another year-end ‘best of’ list

In addition to wanting to reboot my creative writing in 2024, I wanted to increase my consumption of literary fiction. (I say “consumption” because I listen to audiobooks about as much as I read books in print or e-books. And some ableist book snobs people don’t consider audiobooks to be on par with their printed counterparts. So consumption it is.)

I’ve been an avid, but by no means voracious, reader since college. Over the past decade or so, however, I’ve gravitated toward more “practical” and career-oriented reading. I focused mainly on books about leadership, marketing, productivity, organizational dynamics, and such. That focus left little time or energy for more creative, recreational reading.

This year, my reading took a much-needed turn. I read (consumed) a lot of fiction, literary and otherwise, in 2024, as well as some good non-fiction works including history, spirituality, and books about the writing craft. I also re-read some dust-gatherers in my home library, or listened to them. All told, I consumed over 70 titles. You can find them listed on my reading log. My to-be-read (TBR) list continues to expand, and my home-office bookshelves, which I’d purged soon after retiring (three big paper boxes’ worth went to the local library), are beginning to regain a semblance of cozy clutter, even as my Kindle app fills to the brim with digital reads. Audiobooks allowed me to be a more efficient consumer of writing, as I could listen to a book while cleaning, cooking, working out, and driving.

On to my selections:
Continue reading “Friday Five: my year in books”