Riverwords

I strayed off the path of my reading list, but only by way of a country road. A couple weeks ago I found No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy for sale at Half Price Books. I’d eyed it since picking up Blood Meridien and, later, The Road, which is on my reading list [...]

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I finished Cryptonomicon last night, the next block in my wall of reading for 2007. The 910 page whopper wrapped me up for a while. It’s a multi-viewpoint tale interweaving an amusing WWII conspiracy of Axis gold and Allied code breakers and operatives with their modern day descendants. Author Neal Stephenson is verbose, and devilishly [...]

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One of my favorite authors died tonight. Kurt Vonnegut was 84. Loving his goofy, bleakly humored novels seems like some guilty pleasure to me. I remember once when I went back to visit my favorite English professor at the University of Iowa years after graduation, he asked me what I was reading. Already embarrassed that I [...]

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The Iowa weather’s turned cold again. We had wonderful weather, spring waking up the ground and the trees. Now, there are lazy fat flakes in the morning sky, just enough to remind me that April likes to tease. I got used to the warmth, actually. Seven days in the Carribbean will do that, extreme sunburn [...]

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