August Read/Bought Review

I bought no books this month! Although I’ve been very tempted by How Fiction Works, written by a former professor of mine, and I was given this book as a gift at my company: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which is 944 Pages long, and which will take me some time to even develop enough interest to peruse the introduction.

I did read three from my own bookshelf:

How Soccer Explains the World (An Unlikely theory of globalization) by Franklin Foer –If Foer had titled his book differently (perhaps “Soccer Teams I Like and Random Observations about their Country of Play” or “On Hooliganism”), I might have liked it better. As it is, soccer doesn’t explain anything. Rather soccer hooligans, are affected by the same world factors as international businessmen and politicians. Yet they resort to horrific gang violence.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchet – A mesmerizing, truly lyrical book. I was entranced. I haven't read a piece of fiction this good in awhile. This is also a book I would recommend to someone who doesn’t read a lot of fiction. It’s just that penetrating, and it’s a good story that happens to also have beautiful prose.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – This book finally got enough book club action among my acquaintances that I finally had to pull it off my unread bookshelf. I recently committed – like The Writer’s Coin – to read only the books I own before buying any new ones, and I separated everything into separate bookshelves to help me track my progress.