Add Fat City by Leonard Gardner to the list of great anti-California novels. That’s a new sub-genre I’m creating. The anti-California novel looks at the great California dream’s underbelly. What happened to all those people who came to California and didn’t strike it rich, but stayed here anyway? Think Nathenial West’s The Day of the Locust, Charles Bukowski’s Ham and…
Tag: california
Looking for the Next School Wide Read
Finding a book suitable for grades six, seven and eight is not easy. The difference between a seventh grader and an eighth grader is dramatic, but the difference between a sixth and an eighth grader is stunning. This year we did our first school wide read, Chew on This by Charles Wilson and Eric Schlosser, based on Mr….
Sunday Ramble: Travels, Art and Jane Austen Challenge
C.J. and I visited Los Angeles this past week to see the James Kerry Marshall retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the same show we saw last summer in Chicago. We’ve become big fans of Mr. Marshall’s work. It was a mad-cap three-day trip–drive down, day in L.A. and drive home–but we managed to…
Sunday Ramble and Two Books I Didn’t Like. Sorry.
Visited the local Friends of the Library book sale yesterday, in the rain, where C.J. and I managed to spend much more than we intended. He got several art books and a couple of books full of house plans while I nearly completed my Jane Austen collection. Can you name the book I still have to…
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
When I was in college, I was friends with a group of women who shared a flat on Divisidero Street in San Francisco, decades before it became a trendy neighborhood. In the 1980’s, four college students living on four or five hundred dollars a month each could come up with enough money to rent a…
