Currently reading
Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
Operation Greylord: The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America's Biggest Corruption Bust
Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto
My System: 21st Century Edition
The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love
James Madison: A Biography
The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805
Complete Stories
I was oddly disappointed in this. Not in the quality of the writing, which is superb. The author sets out to accomplish a task, and the technique of writing is bent and twisted to her will, achieving her vision exactly as her mind's eye must have seen it. My complaint is simply with her intended effect. I didn't enjoy it. So it's great writing, but I didn't care for the message. She was such a profoundly unhappy person, tormented by life's whims, being a women in the times she lived, the spectre of depression in an age without silver ribbons, and the cliched but never unfailingly tragic alcoholism she shared with so many of her profession. You can taste all this like a metallic spoon in the soup of her craft. For some, this will tinge it with naturalistic realism. For me, even sadness can still hold the promise of eventual hope. But you won't find it in these stories.
