Racism
Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap
Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot. (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.) So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]
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Isabel Wilkerson: Caste
Blurb: The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down […]
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Chester Himes: The Real Cool Killers
Blurb: To detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, it looked like an open and shut case. After all, Sonny Pickens was still standing over the body of Ulysses Galen, smoking gun hanging from his hand. Only one problem: Sonny’s gun was loaded with blanks. There were plenty of people who wanted Galen dead, […]
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Attica Locke: Bluebird, Bluebird
Blurb: When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules — a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as […]
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Ngaio Marsh: The New Zealand Books, plus Grave Mistake
The first book by Ngaio Marsh that I ever read happened to be her very last one, Light Thickens, which is as much concerned with a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as it is with the murder of one of the cast members. To a mystery fan without any Shakespearean inclinations, this might have proved fatal, […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “L”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “F”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “B”
This is a post belonging to a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. As always, the only thing linking the two items mentioned in this post in my mind is that they both start with the […]
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Africa Reading List – Seeking Recommendations
In connection with my Around the World in 80 Books reading project, I have created, as an additional reference point, a reading list containing the books currently on my TBR with an “Africa” shelving: http://booklikes.com/apps/reading-lists/974/africa The list includes the three books set in Africa I already read in 2019, but none read prior to this […]
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Happy Independence Day – and, my Freedom and Future Library
Related Blog Post: Book Recs Solicited: Freedom and Future Library Reading Project: Freedom and Future Library Could there possibly be a better day on which to finally follow up on my Freedom and Future Library post? Truth be told, I’d been hoping to compile this much faster, but RL threw a major spanner in […]
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Book Recs Solicited: Freedom and Future Library
You’d have to be living under a rock buried somewhere halfway down to the center of the earth in order not to be aware that in recent years our beautiful world has been shaken up by a number of crises the likes of which I, at least, have not experienced in my entire lifetime — […]
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Gregory Doran & Antony Sher: Woza Shakespeare — Titus Andronicus in South Africa
Man, what a trip. Titus Andronicus is not, and never will be my favorite play by William Shakespeare, but having read this book, I’d give anything to be able to watch a recording of this particular production. In the 1980s (when Apartheid was still in full swing) Gregory Doran (later: Artistic Director of the Royal […]
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Ruminating On: Scared White People and #blacklivesmatter [REBLOG]
Reblogged with the author’s express permission from: Edward Lorn – on BookLikes: Lornographic Material There are people, white and black and otherwise, who will read this blog post and automatically dismiss it. Some might even say it’s not my place. I cannot do anything about them. All I can do is tell my story, and maybe […]
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“Continent Isolated”
Albeit apocryphal, this was the first English idiomatic expression I ever learned: The alleged 1930s newspaper headline “Heavy fog over the Channel: Continent Isolated.” – Not the British Isles, but Mainland Europe cut off. The person from whom I heard this was, of all people, my 5th grade English teacher, who professed to be an Anglophile […]
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Jeannie Come Lately Post: BookLikes Round Robin — Favorite Pre-1980s Movies
Pretty much everybody has seen it at this point I guess, but anyway, here is Book Cupidity’s idea: “Let’s list favorite old (or older) movies. The list can be long or short, with a narrative or no, anything goes. The parameters is that it has to have been made prior to 1980, I sort of […]
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