Free Range Librarian

I read David Vann’s A Mile Down early one Saturday morning when I thought I was going back to sleep but didn’t, in one luxurious unstoppable four-hour marathon that meant the cats sulked in the living room because I didn’t top off their food bowls and I was late to some meeting I had sworn [...]

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This is a test of the review feature; I’ve upgraded Movable Type to 3.3 and Media Manager to 1.1.
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All the Pretty Horses (Vintage International)
by Cormac Mccarthy

Miriam reminds me how stale my reviews are. I read All The Pretty Horses over a month ago, then got halfway through The Crossing before I got tired of the wolf (if you’ve read The Crossing, my guess is you really like the wolf or you don’t… after [...]

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I waited to review “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” until the spring grades were in, so it didn’t look like I was brown-nosing Lewis Buzbee, who taught my spring lit class. (Not that I am above brown-nosing… every week I rearranged the classroom tables and wiped down the whiteboard; I would have stayed after to clap erasers, [...]

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The Best American Essays 2006 (Best American Essays)
by Houghton Mifflin

I’m not reading this book; I probably won’t bother with Best American Essays 2006 until it’s out in paperback this fall. But courtesy of my local public library (MPL?), I’m reading through the set of BAE from the first volume–1987–forward, up to 2001, which will then [...]

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Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times
by Basic Books

I thought my first book after I finished my last class would be Mystic River, but halfway through it I got impatient and skipped to the end. Then I went to a library with a list of books I was just dying to read, but none of them [...]

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The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion

Here it is: the last reading assignment. I read it over Christmas, then re-read it a month ago, and again last week. It is a true account of grief, as a friend commented last week, one that refuses to place mourning along a pat chronology but shows Didion moving [...]

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Vintage Didion (Vintage Original)
by Joan Didion

This isn’t the collection I would begin with if I were starting with Didion; I’d start with The White Album or Slouching Toward Bethlehem. But it has great cover art (a photo of Didion) and two essays by her I return to repeatedly: “Girl of the Golden West,” a near-perfect [...]

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Chris Rose: 1 Dead in Attic, originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian.

“They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators.” — Chris Rose
Chris Rose was a [...]

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Made Possible By: Succeeding with Sponsorship
by Patricia Martin

(Eek: author’s last name corrected. Pretty bad when the book is sitting next to me on my desk!) When I asked Steve Coffman his advice about new revenue streams for My Place Of Work, without hesitation he said “Buy Patricia Martin’s book about sponsorships, ‘Made Possible By.’” [...]

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