Andy > Recent Status Updates

Slow-going: talk-cum-ranking of ind. players is uniformly less interesting than hearing Ted's own crusty homespun wisdom about hitting in the abstract, itself expanded upon in "The Science of Hitting." We'll see how long I stick with it.

*My travel-baseball son loves the sport, and I support him however I can. Happily, watching him play has rekindled my own love, several decades on. More baseball books TK.*

Sordid in the extreme; better wedded to the short form as a sketch of abject deprivation; hardly a novel as such. I have a greater appreciation for the evolution of McCarthy's art. Graduating from the small stakes of a regional-gothicist's outsize will to shock, to the coruscating mastery of Suttree in his very next book, is a remarkable feat. I am no longer eager to read the books he wrote before this one, however.

Incisive, subtle, expansive: a must-read for Faulknerites alongside Michael Gorra's recent bio, The Saddest Words. Howe was THIRTY-TWO when he wrote this?? HOW?