I thought this book would be a short and sweet read, but I struggled through it. I plowed through and understood only thirty percent of it. It’s definitely my own shortcomings as a reader.

I must admit. As I was reading this book, my mind was drifting off elsewhere; therefore, I got lost half way through, but I kept reading because I didn’t want to give up. After finishing it the first time, I didn’t get much out of it. I decided to start over from the beginning and to read slowly.

Deborah Levy’s Real Estate turned out to be lyrical and beautiful and I enjoyed it the second time around. Levy writes about her single life at sixty. She and her husband had divorced and her daughters had moved out of her house. In addition to places she was dreaming of, she was searching for characters, the female characters in particular. I love the following passage about estate and language:

None of this real estate belonged to me, but I felt I belonged to it.

I wrote every day in its long, timbered attic and finally acknowledged I did not have a tranquil relationship with language because I am in love with it. I asked myself, what sort of love? Language is a building site. It is always in the process of being constructed and repaired. It can fall apart and be made again.

I definitely recommend reading it slowly for pleasure. It is indeed short and sweet.

A collection of essays from 1968 to 2000, Joan Didion has written eloquently on various subjects including Nancy Reagan, Ernest Hemingway, and Martha Stewart. My personal favorites are her own reflection on “Telling Stories” and “Why I Write.” She writes:

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

A short, sweet, and pleasurable read.

Thoughtful and tender, this collection of personal essays delves into today’s culture including maternity, sexuality, masculinity, spirituality, and vulnerability. Zoffness’s prose is honest and hilarious. Here’s her reason for writing:

I wrote—I write—because I prize language’s surprises and limitations, and because in college I connected to books more than I did to friends. Literature offered throughways to comprehension, to compassion, to a quieter mind. Writing offered the same, though its lens flipped around, allowed me to introspect, test assumptions, unscramble experiences and observations. It was an attempt to participate in the conversation rather than just nod along to it.

I love it and highly recommend this collection of memoirs.

After reading the introduction, I had a different expectation for the book. I thought Jaffe would delve into how we can find some glimpse of happiness from our job since we spent the majority of our waking hours working. In contrast, Jaffe writes about inequalities, politics, and exploitations that come with work. We still have to work to make a living; therefore, we might as well demand better working conditions. Not what I expected from this book, but an informative and essential read nevertheless.

Dù bộc lộ tình cảm, tình yêu, hay tình quê hương, lời thơ của ông Đặng Quang Chính giản dị, dễ hiểu, và dễ gần. Chẳng hạn như bốn câu “Mơ về nắng đẹp”:

Vần thơ trao đổi nắng mưa
Vần thơ làm bạn dỗ dành trái tim
Đọc xong con mắt lim dim
Mơ ngày nắng đẹp lần tìm gặp em.

Một giấc mơ nhẹ nhàng của một người xa quê hương. Ý thơ của ông dễ đọc nhưng phần typography quá tệ. Phông chữ dấu Việt bị nhiều lỗi. Tác giả chỉ chú trọng vào lời thơ chứ không để ý đến cách trình bày và nghệ thuật chữ Việt cho những tác phẩm của mình. Hơi đáng tiếc.

In this painstakingly beautiful novel, Elinor, half-white-half-Asian model-turned-writer, returns to her hometown, North Dakota, to cover the oil boom for a magazine article her professor who she had an affair with passed on to her. She set out to interview the workers in the small town and unearthed deep layers of classism, racism, and sexism. Yun’s writing is engaging, compelling, and devastating. She taps into the unmistakable American story—a heartbreaking, breathtaking read.

Sedaris’s diaries from 2004 to 2020 are filled with humorous stories he had seen, heard, or encountered. His observations are the money shots. The “balls” joke is just too hilarious. His entries on the 2020 election are moving. Against all odds, his father beat Covid at age 97. It made me wonder what if I never made that 911 call to get my mother hospitalized. Could she have beaten COVID as well? I can’t turn back time now.

What prompted me to read this book was that I wanted to write my blog posts like he writes his diaries. What I had discovered is that Sedaris hated writing about feelings. He thinks feelings are boring and no one gives a fuck how you feel. I finally understand why he is a successful writer and I am still an amateur. Then again, Sedaris does Sedaris and I do me. I will continue to write about my feelings and the things I want to write about. Even if no one cares, I do, and that’s all that matters.

In his riveting book, Brain Deer, a multi-award-winning investigative reporter, digs deep into three decades of Andrew Wakefield’s misinformation war on vaccines. Deer exposes Wakefield’s professional misconduct, dishonesty, and fraud. Wakefield claimed that the MMR vaccine caused inflammatory bowel disease. He argued that autistic enterocolitis was related to bowel disease and regression and that opioid peptides impact the brain. He conducted studies of twelve kids that had autism caused by vaccines. Unfortunately, these kids already developed autistic behaviors before they were vaccinated. It took me almost a month to read this book and I am glad that I took the time to learn about the doctor with no patients who fooled the world. Deer’s work is a master of investigative journalism.

Edward Sorel is a satirical cartoonist and an unapologetic leftist. His illustrations appeared on the covers of major publications such as the Esquire, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. His memoir is both personal and political. His writing is engaging and his works are exceptional. A must-read for designers. I didn’t even know about Mr. Sorel and to my surprise he is 92 years old. He can still write and draw at his age. I have utter respect and admiration for the man. I enjoyed this book throughout and I am glad that I had picked it up to read it.

I read the entire novel and still hadn’t understood the plot, but then the plot doesn’t matter. This is the kind of book that you just read a bit at a time. If you know the reference, you will enjoy it. If you don’t know then you just have to keep reading. Lockwood is a brilliant writer and any part of this book can be quoted. Here’s one:

The first boy who had ever called her a bitch was now in jail for possession of child pornography, and this felt like a metaphor for the modern discourse. But the modern discourse, too, was his mother moaning after a single glass of red wine, “I know that he’ll have to go to hell, but still he’s my son” and “What did we do? What did we do? What did we do! What did we do!”