April Read/Bought Review

Weird that it's already the end of April....

Bought:
Last Night by James Salter $6 at Housing Works bookstore in NY. Worth it, since it’s $6 towards a good cause. Housing Works is a non-profit that benefits AIDS research and related initiatives. They also have thrift shops across NY. Very cool, this would definitely be something I’d volunteer with eventually.

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner One of those insane $25 hardcover, really silly impulse purchase when I was shopping with my parents. But the book does look good… so I will report back next month after I’ve gotten through it.

Read:
A Theft by Saul Bellow.
I read this in an hour on my flight to New York. A quick, emotional, weird read. Bellow is one of those writers where I don’t necessarily relish the story, but rather, the individual lines and images. There’s some brilliance in the way he can imbue these ordinary words and phrases with more depth of meaning than they have.

Last Night by James Salter
A collection of short stories that I’ve been piecing my way through. Very beautiful. My favorite so far is the first, called Comet. Salter takes on unexpected characters for a literary writer. Very refreshing.

9/11 Commission Report
I bookmooched this… and while this sounds so dry, it has actually been so much more engaging than I thought it would be. It provides in clear, plain-English language the history and background leading up to the attacks, how the concepts of “terror” and “counter-terror” even developed. I’m only halfway through because it’s (obviously) not a beach read. I only wish I had read this sooner so I could have been dissecting the news a bit more. It’s sad, but I just know that I can’t trust network news anymore. Too many soundbites, so little nuance. On a side note, Elizabeth Edwards had a fantastic Op-Ed in the Times yesterday, Bowling 1, Health Care 0, reaming the media for their unreliability.