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What I'm reading, what I've been reading
Apr. 23rd, 2013 11:11 amHubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus, by Gregory Gibson. Pretty much what it says in the title and the summary on the back. It's kind of interesting to see how Bob, the book dealer, works and to follow him through his marriages, divorces, and mental breakdown as he deals with everything in his life and nearly goes crazy from that and from his involvement with the Arbus photos. There's interesting discussion about how art objects are attributed and valued. I couldn't put it down, but [[SPOILER]] the unresolved ending was disappointing.
Shadow Baby, Margaret Forster. Two daughters given up by their birth mothers, two stories of how they grew up. Two women who relinquished their babies, and what happened after that. As the girls grow up their need to find their “real” mothers grows intense. What will the meeting be like? Is a (birth) mother’s love superior to all other loves?
She’s one of my favorite writers. She really gets people.
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, Timothy Egan. About the establishment of national parks, early rangers fighting the timber barons who wanted to prof-it from America’s forests, and a huge fire in 1910 that burned three million acres of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Our housemate, a serious hiker, lent it to me, and I’m enjoying it. The prologue describes people evacuating the town of Wallace, Idaho by train as the fire bears down on them, and it’s clearly the fire that inspired the novel A Prayer For the Dying, by Stewart O’Nan, which was one of my “best books” for 2012. O’Nan also wrote The Circus Fire, a great and horrifying non-fiction book.
Shadow Baby, Margaret Forster. Two daughters given up by their birth mothers, two stories of how they grew up. Two women who relinquished their babies, and what happened after that. As the girls grow up their need to find their “real” mothers grows intense. What will the meeting be like? Is a (birth) mother’s love superior to all other loves?
She’s one of my favorite writers. She really gets people.
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, Timothy Egan. About the establishment of national parks, early rangers fighting the timber barons who wanted to prof-it from America’s forests, and a huge fire in 1910 that burned three million acres of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Our housemate, a serious hiker, lent it to me, and I’m enjoying it. The prologue describes people evacuating the town of Wallace, Idaho by train as the fire bears down on them, and it’s clearly the fire that inspired the novel A Prayer For the Dying, by Stewart O’Nan, which was one of my “best books” for 2012. O’Nan also wrote The Circus Fire, a great and horrifying non-fiction book.
