Guest Columns
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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A Rant from Mike Branch!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns
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Michael P. Branch is Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has published five books and more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews. Also, he is funny.
His new book, Rants from the Hill, is due out on June 6.
A confirmed desert rat, Mike lives with his wife and two daughters at 6,000 feet in the remote western Great Basin Desert, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Range. Check out more about Mike here.
Balloons on the Moon
Our part of the desert West is so inaccessible that the common detritus of the dominant endemic species, Hillbillicus nevadensis redneckii, is nowhere to be seen. So while the rutted, dusty BLM roads in the sandy, sage-choked wash bottoms are beribboned with spent shell casings, wide-mouthed bottles of Coors light, and empty cans of chew, there is simply no easy way to litter the steep, rocky high country. However, there is one unfortunate exception to this rule, and that is when trash is airlifted into these isolated mountains and canyons in the form of balloons.
I have picked up so many trashed balloons over the years that I find myself wondering what the hell is so jolly about California, which is the nearby, upwind place where all this aerial trash originates. Maybe the prevalence of balloons in the otherwise litter-free high desert should not surprise me, since millions of balloons are released in the U.S. each year. We release balloons at graduation celebrations, birthday parties, wedding ceremonies, football games, even funerals. There is actually a company called Eternal Ascent that will, for fifteen hundred dollars, load your ashes into a balloon and float them away. Balloon launches for a pet’s ashes cost only six hundred dollars, though, so if I go this route, I have instructed my family to claim I was a Saint Bernard.
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 meets Bad Advice Wednesday: Do Your Summer Reading this Fall
categories: Bad Advice / bad advice / Guest Columns
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Bill Lundgren with Pearl the Blind Pug
The return to school and teaching duties in the fall always comes with a bittersweet sense of loss. Gone the unfettered freedom of summer with the absence of deadlines and in their place swimming and gardening and hiking and baseball and most of all, reading… savoring the exquisite pleasures of books and marveling at the universe’s talent for selecting just the right book at just the right time. Below are a few of the highlights of the past summer’s reads. But don’t let Fall keep you from discovering them all: Continue reading →
