Lundgren’s Lounge: “My Absolute Darling,” by Gabriel Tallent
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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With the arrival of summer comes the inevitable onslaught of summer titles, those books you all MUST read, for your own edification, or for cocktail party chatter or for the simple pleasures of this increasingly arcane act that we call reading. These books arrive on the scene to great trumpet blasts and ubiquitous and rapturous front page reviews… and by the next year they have been largely forgotten, relegated to the remainder shelves or the used book section of the bookstore or most ignominiously, serving duty as a doorstop. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Augustown,” by Kei Miller
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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New Book Tour Coming: Sartorial Advice Appreciated
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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From time to time invaluable advice arrives in my email inbox. And while I pride myself on my excellent shampooing skills and first-class Banana Republic and Reny’s (A Maine Adventure!) closet, I’m not exactly a GQ model. So this anonymous note that came via my website, really made my day. I’ll take it to heart as I go out on tour with The Girl of the Lake. Very lightly redacted to protect the sender’s privacy:
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Dear Bill, Can I call you Bill. I was at your reading in B______ and I have some ideas for you. Now if you happen to take this personally, oh well. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “One Eyed Man,” by Ron Currie
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Ron Currie, with David Foster Wallace upon his forearm
A disclaimer is in order here: Ron Currie is a friend of mine. We watch baseball together while drinking beer and it is my fervent hope that the upcoming Red Sox season will help to ameliorate the execrable political situation we are presently wallowing in. However none of this has anything to do with the review that follows. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Peregrine,” by J.A. Baker
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Somehow this once obscure, extraordinarily unique book found its way into my hands, transporting me for a few days to the coastal fenlands of eastern England and the world of the peregrine falcon. The Peregrine by J. A. Baker was originally published in 1967 during a period of steep decline in the population of these magnificent raptors and perhaps that was part of what motivated the author—to attempt to describe the life of a creature at once so ferociously singular and powerful, before it was gone forever. But what Baker accomplishes along the way is much deeper, achieving “… an account of a human obsession with a creature that is peerless.”
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Avid Reader,” by Robert Gottlieb
categories: Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Sometimes I feel like my life-long devotion to the act of reading marks me as a member of a cabal, furtive and unnoticed, moving around the edges of contemporary culture. And by reading I mean reading books… bound, tangible artifacts symbolic of the perhaps quaint notion that we can be enlightened and entertained by the words on a page. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Everybody’s Fool” by Richard Russo
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Over the course of a rich and varied reading life, I find myself returning to the pleasures of an engaging story, well-told, again and again. Excursions to the academic and literary fringes (and too often, the fiction pages of the New Yorker) reveals a miasma of intellectual postmodern tomfoolery that leads this reader, unfulfilled, back to the power of a simple story, offered up by the hands of a master story-teller. Everybody’s Fool, a sequel to the much loved Nobody’s Fool, by Richard Russo, is the quintessential example of just such a story and just such a writer.
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Unknown Caller,” by Debra Spark
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Debra Spark’s recently published fourth novel, Unknown Caller, might be superficially characterized as a mystery, for it is certainly mysterious. From the opening (“It is two in the morning when the phone rings… When the phone rings at 2:00 a.m. at their house, it is always her calling.”), author Spark is inviting her readers to interrogate the reliability of their assumptions. An early morning phone call is ALWAYS a portent of disaster, right? And when the caller on the other end of the line rarely speaks, it weaves an almost claustrophobic sense of impending doom. But this beguiling novel is far more than mere mystery. At the heart of this riveting, non-chronological narrative, riven as it with myriad twists and turns and somersaults and flips, lies an examination of the very nature of perception. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Hillbilly Elegy,” by J.D. Vance
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance is a curious book that brought to mind both Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America and Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class Wars. While the two latter titles are much more overtly political in perspective than Vance’s memoir, all the works reflect a growing preoccupation with a demographic group that feels left behind in the tectonic cultural and employment shifts that have ensued in the wake of globalization.
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Stop Here, This is the Place,” by Susan Conley and Winky Lewis
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Words and images on the page have a variety of purposes: to instruct, to persuade, to ediify, to entertain, to evoke… and it is this last that comes to mind while reading and looking at Stop Here: This is the Place, A Year in Motherhood, a unique collaboration between photographer Winky Lewis and writer Susan Conley. Continue reading →
