Category Archives: Books

Good Books

Currently Reading
Twain, Mark – Life on the Mississippi (NF)

2012 Reading List
Carr, Nicholas – The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (NF)
Krakauer, Jon – Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (NF)

2011 Reading List
Borowski, Tadeusz – This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman (SS)
Boyle, TC – My Pain is Worse Than Your Pain (SS)
Cheever, John – Reunion (SS)
DeLillo, Don – Baader-Meinhof (SS)
DeLillo, Don – Mao II (F)
DeLillo, Don – White Noise (F)
Downey, Peter – So You’re Going to be a Dad (NF) Continue reading

Rabbit, Run

John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run (1960) was written, according to the author, then 28, as a response to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, “depict[ing] what happens when a young American family man goes on the road . . . [it is] the people left behind [who] get hurt.”

There, behind the Brewer, Pennsylvania ice plant, a backboard and hoop have been nailed to a telephone pole. A group of young boys gather, a game of basketball having sprouted from the cracks of the concrete slab like bracts of green grass and yellow weeds too long festering. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom stands there watching the children play, a cigarette dangling from his lip. Though he is not, he cannot help but wonder if the boys infer him a deviant of some sort, a sexual pervert ogling at them in their common game. Continue reading