Dave Schaafsma > Recent Status Updates

Just started it, but I observe the two main characters are brothers, one a lawyer, the other a chess player, two things associated with logic, argument; before she became a novelist, Rooney was a highly competitive debater. Argument vs. story as ways of knowing. Most of her end notes are on her literary quotations. Epigraph/refs to Wittgenstein, who moved from logic to questioning it in Philosophical Investigations.

I knew nothing about this book, which I'll read with my spring 2024 YAL class. I am a Michigander, having spent many summers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so I knew that, and that intrigued me. And the indigenous cultural background of the mc. Still, I found the opening chapters kinda standard YA. But then everything changes! I can begin to see the basis for the acclaim.

The first of who knows how many Booker 2023 Long-Listed books, the first I was able to get my hands on. Squash is the ostensible subject, as a distraction from. . . we'll see.

Begun in 2019, put down after a 100 pages because it made me sad for him to revisit in the time of climate destruction the many places he had visited in his life. Begun again in December 2020 and put down again when he died that same month. Since I just got back from Alaska, I now am determined to finish it., restarting it. One of my favorite (nature) writers ever.

It's not fair to Lily King that I am reading this book simultaneously with Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got HIs Gun, certainly one of the most brutal anti-war books of all time--I can't read much of it and then have to put it down. Then King's book of mostly East coast stories of seeming privilege (this isn't exactly true, but it's partly the effect of the comparison) also makes me want to put this book down after a time.

Because I am reading the traumatizing Johnny Got His Gun and need to alternate between dire and something lighter. And because this summer I will read more short stories.

read this in my twenties, so because of Ukraine, thought I would read Tolstoy's take, but I can't honestly promise I will read it all. After three hours of reading I have barely made a dent in it.

Because Ukraine and Endless War I had decided to read or reread several anti-war books, and this one I first read in the seventies, when it was carried around by thousands of anti-Vietnam War protesters, including me, but this is brutal, not easy to read. Features introductions by a woman whose son was killed in Iraq, and Born on the Fourth of July author Ron Kovic, who was paralyzed from the chest down.

Rereading after decades, a quite different translation the translators attest is more in keeping with the author's intentions.

Skipped the Academy Awards last night and instead read Hollywood nightmare story (well, one of mine), The Day of the Locust, and am now reading the grimmest Marlowe story of Hollywood, learning than the cover of my local rags feature Hollywood idols Will Smith and Chris Rock instead of the horrors of Ukraine and millions of refugees and thousands of war dead. Chandler and West smirk grimly from their graves.

I got the point of this early on--A self-obsessed social media star/addict scrolling endlessly and cleverly commenting is shallow, until real life terror intervenes. Well written, clever, but still sadly predictable. But maybe I will eventually love it. It irritates me as try to navigate real world tragedies.

I am pretty sure I read this in my twenties, when I had no idea I would be anything but healthy. Now I am ill (with melanoma), and some pretty extensive surgery, awaiting test results to see whether "they got it all" or whether more horrors await me.

not to overshare here, but I just had some fairly extensive melanoma surgery, so thought I would look again at this book, and maybe others by Sontag, and maybe The Emperor of all Maladies. The good news: I'm not too sick to read a lot, and I have to stay down a lot. This can work as a secret excuse, when non readers feel sorry for you because you can't be bustling around.

not to oversh

This book, set in my village and high school, features my friend Pete Kahn's Spoken Word Club, central to the documentary Louder Than a Bomb, and recently featured on NPR.

I just thought, with the boys of different countries drumming up yet another war, it might be time to finally read this satirical anti-war classic from 1921,

This is sort of rare for me: I finished this book, found it sort of bland, got the taste of rave reviews, as from Petra, that it was two different books. So am rereading it and probably going to see the film before I review it.

Inn final page proof stage. ... May 15 pub date. It looks cool!

Rereading in anticipation of the next volume sometime in 2022. For those of you who are unfamiliar, this is one of the best comics series of all time--funny, fun, inventive, smart-assed, heart-breaking, with award-winning art and character invention. Yes, you need to read or reread Maus, because of what, not just because some Tennessee school board, but because it is one of the best stories of all time, but this, too

I'm reading this because it is the only interesting thing so far in The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

I saw this book on the Hard Case Crime book list, and found it amusing. Then I thought the author was a made up name, and sure it is, he's a performer in neo-burlesque in NYC.

More than halfway, finally, as I take my peaceful holiday break to read a true crime book about killer Gary Gilmore, who was infamous in the seventies. Is it any good, you say? Well, Norman Mailer wrote it. With zero commentary, like nothing he ever wrote, in the flattest western working class prose. Feels almost like straight ethnography of the language and culture of that time and place.

Working on the page proofs. And here is the Cover Reveal story in LitHub:
https://lithub.com/cover-real-northwe...

So the gorgeous cover is now here. See my blog on my page for the LitHub Cover Reveal story featuring the internationally lauded artist Emil Ferris, author of My Favorite Thing is Monsters. Will be out in May 2022! An edited volume of stories--some fictional, most memoir--of growing up in particular Chicago neighborhoods. A model (we thought) for young people to write their own growing up stories. Pretty exciting!

This is one of the bestsellers of American mystery fiction. No one thinks of Robert Traver as in the same class as the elite mystery/noir writers such as Thompson, Chandler, Hammet or Cain, but this is still so good. I will also re-view the much-awarded film adaptation. We know there was a murder, and we know who did it right from the first, so most of this is courtroom drama, but written as a former DA who knows.

Just cracked this book, which at 592 pages hard cover, oversized, I can barely lift. But to an old Bergman fan, it looks incredible.

Demons, also sometimes titled in English Devils, though when I grew it was The Possessed. This is the one great work--of four--from the master I have never read. This is the definitive translation, by Pevear and Volokhonsky. I'll also listen to an audio version if I'm on the road.