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 arithmetic by Paul Lockhart To get the ball rolling on this blog, I’m going to start with a non-fiction book that I doubt many are familiar with, Arithmetic by Paul Lockhart, published in 2019, a thin volume of 240 pages. Now, I know that title is going to turn lots of people off right from […]

The epiphany machine is a device that looks like an antique sewing machine or the jawbone of an extinct animal that tattoos the arms of users with a phrase that reveals their quintessential nature, or is it their most serious failing – or are they the same thing? It’s a divine or diabolical creation, or

 2.5/5 Peter, the central character and co-narrator of this smart, well-crafted novel, is a young writer (or would-be writer) who, throughout the course of the book and not unlike most of the other major characters, behaves badly. Involved with themselves and their desire to produce art to validate their existence, the characters engage in

 3.5/5 The name Ezra Pound brings to my mind mixed feelings of a character both brilliant and unsavory, but I really knew very little about him. I have vague memories of reading a bit of the Cantos as an undergraduate, but not a great reader of poetry, I haven’t attempted it again since. In

 2.5/5 As an ESL teacher who has written and adapted texts for limited English speakers I have long used and recognized the value of such tools as word frequency counters and readability checkers to make sure readings I assigned were appropriate for students. As I writer I make some use of these tools to

 3/5 I picked this book up off a dollar store shelf, taken by the title. I taught ESL and among language teachers it’s commonplace to say that a student is starting to make real progress when s/he begins dreaming in the target language. It turned out that the book didn’t concern language acquisition at

 4/5 This is the first novel by John Lawton that I’ve read (and yes, this is #8 in a series) and the first spy thriller I’ve read in a long time. It’s not a genre I’m into, but it would be hard not to admire how well constructed and how well-written this book is.

Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook, translated by Chi-young Kim This well-crafted novel revolving around the disappearance of an elderly woman at a busy train station in Seoul peels back the layers of her life and those of her family members as they search for her. It’s a compelling but sad book that looks at incidents

 4/5 I enjoyed Mlodinow’s earlier books Subliminal and The Drunkard’s Walk and am pleased to say that this book is in much the same vein and did not disappoint. The main thesis is that humans have a proclivity for elastic or flexible, non-analytical thinking, which especially important in the modern, rapidly changing world. Elastic

 4/5 I just read this little gem of a book. It had been sitting on my bookshelf for years, and based on the “withdrawn” stamp on the first page it’s something I picked up at a library sale – and paid little attention to since. I hadn’t heard of the book or author and

 4/5 In the old days when I attended high school, Sinclair Lewis was a mainstay in English classes, and we read Main Street and Arrowsmith. I thought of Lewis as a chronicler of mainstream American life, a life different from what I knew growing up in the Bronx. Just like TV shows such as

 4.5/5 This novel tells the story of one man, Mevlut, his journey from adolescence to middle age, his family, and the physical, social and political changes that took place in Turkey, especially Istanbul, between 1969 and 2012. In telling the story of this one man’s life, Pamuk tells a larger story that ultimately transcends