Stepping in the Write Direction

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston is like a vivid crazy quilt of a book. It starts out with a Foreword by Alice Walker, who states, “Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they have the medicine. Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ is a perfect example of this.” The book includes more than simply the description of her interviews with former slave eighty-six-year-old Kossola aka Cudjo Lewis, which lasts about 94 pages of the 210 page book. The balance of this narrative is followed by a 20 page Afterward which discusses many aspects related to the process of writing Barracoon, a controversy, and issues connected with the book. This is followed by a brief Acknowledgements. Also included is a list of Founders and Original Residents of Africatown where Kossola lived. Next is a very interesting Glossary that reads like a story itself, and the Bibliography of supporting and related books is a must read for anyone inte...

Awake Between Worlds: Understanding Hypnagogia and the Threshold Between Sleep and Wakefulness by Katerina Silin is a brief, concise, clear, and easy to understand book about  the psychological state of hypnagogia which she has personally experienced. She also mentions well known creative minds, including writer Charles Dickens who have literally imagined solutions or material for their work while in a state of hypnagogia, and acknowledges, “ hypnagogia can become an inexhaustible creative resource.” Silin describes t he hypnagogic state as, “…a very brief and specific moment that scientists describe as the boundary between wakefulness and sleep… Many people spoke about the sensation of falling at the moment of falling asleep—often accompanied by sudden muscle jerks. This, too, is part of hypnagogia … I see shadows—vivid images of strangers and animals—at the very moment I should be falling asleep…My brain, trained for logic, could not cope with the fact that these visions felt abs...

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit) is one of the best World War II (WWII) books I’ve read. It covers the amazing experiences of Louis Zamperini and those he served with during WWII, his inauspicious sometimes criminal early life in Torrence, California and, thanks to the persistence of his brother Peter, his introduction to running, which ultimately culminates with his participation in the Olympics, after setting many records during his high school years.  After high school graduation Zamperini enlists, is sent to a post Pearl Harbor attack world on the island of  Oahu where constant vigilance characterizes the need to stay on top of Japanese military moves, and watching out for their fighter planes known as Zeros in order to protect that  beleaguered series of islands . The speed with which Japan invades countries gives reason for concern, as the author notes during this general time period Japan also “… attacked Thailand, Shanghai, Malaya, the Philippi...

About one third of the way into Queen Esther by John Irving, I was thinking to myself the characters were unique in a New England gothic kind of way. They didn’t represent the traditional great American family, as the Winslows eschewed religion,  most conventions of 20th century life  and loved reading and education , but on their behalf, their own blended family was strong, supportive, and bonded. As I entered the second third of the book, I began to think “Words, so very many words!” I wondered what the word count was for this book. The problem wasn’t the number of words per se, but the fact they didn’t serve as vehicles moving a compelling story forward in a way that kept me eager to turn each page. By the final third of the book I was praying for the end to come, as I am afflicted with a kind of OCD that compels me to read to the end of every book I start, and most often sticking to it is worth it in the long run.  One of Irving’s earlier books, The Cider House Rules,...

I started reading War by Bob Woodward on a Saturday afternoon, and continued throughout the night until finishing it the following morning. The glimpses of behind the scenes action starting with the earliest intelligence reports indicating Russia was primed to invade Ukraine, the disbelief this would happen on the part of Ukraine leaders, developing concerns as the invasion initiated and progressed, expanding into war, the strategies employed by Ukrainian fighters, later events related to Hamas’ attacks in Israel October 7, 2023, and both those conflicts continuing simultaneously, made for riveting reading, and I didn’t want to sit the book down! The thrust of the story concerned trying to avoid war on both those fronts, and once military engagements arose, the Biden administration efforts to minimize damages and prevent world wide global involvement. This was a much more interesting book than I’d expected with respect to these specific aspects of the narrative. Woodward states in his ...

Lovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende was published on April Fools Day 2024, and it feels a bit like a literary celebration of that holiday! Basically the story’s about a young couple found in an art museum where they have allegedly spent the night making love on every floor, completely unbeknownst to security which requires a willing suspension of disbelief. The young man is buck naked until someone covers his manhood with a hat, and the young lady is in a wedding gown (her new lover couldn’t work the buttons), having chickened out in the hours leading up to her scheduled nuptials because the groom just didn’t turn her on, unlike her new friend, who had the presence of mind to propose to her shortly after their meeting, although when investigators asked her lover’s name, she didn’t know what it was, but once she learned it, found it muy simpatico. There are some mystical elements involved in the tale, which reminded me a bit of Gabriela Marquez’s work. I did find the story humorous i...