Books Acquired

• Katherine Applegate Crenshaw (kindle, for Marta)
• Ali Benjamin The Thing About Jellyfish (hardcover, Books a Million)
• Charles McCarry The Miernik Dossier (kindle)
• Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning (overdrive, kindle)
• Samuel R. Delaney Babel-17 (kindle, on sale for $1.99)
• Ray Bradbury Bradbury Stories: 100 of his most celebrated tales (kindle)
• Mark Z. Danielewski The Familiar Volume 2 (paper, amazon)

Books Read

• Ali Benjamin The Thing About Jellyfish (with Marta)
• Ray Bradbury Stories (selections) (kindle)
• Emmanuel Carrere Limonov: The outrageous adventures of the radical poet who became a bum in New York, a sensation on France, and a political antihero in Russia
• Brandon I Koerner The Skies Belong to Us: love and terror in the golden age of highjacking (kindle)
• Harlan Coben The Stranger (kindle)
• Frank DeFord The Old Ball Game: how John McGraw, Christy Matthewson and  the New York Giants created modern baseball (kindle)
• Mark Z. Danielewski The Familiar volume 1: one rainy day in May

I read Coben’s book not looking for great literature, but a time passing thriller. I suppose it was that, but color me unimpressed. The plot was ok, but I kept waiting to encounter a paragraph, or even a sentence that impressed me so much I just has to copy it down. That moment never came.  I also read the book since I felt obliged to read something New Jersey based now that I have lived in this state for over a year. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the descriptions were so generic they could have been about just about any suburban community in the United States. I have read better books.

The highlight of this month’s reading was Danielewski’s first volume of the familiar. The book clocks in at over 800 pages and is only the first of a planned 27 volumes. I will put some of my thoughts about the book in a future entry.