Hillary Clinton wrote to thank Barbara Morrison for writing Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. The letter said: “I am grateful to you for sharing your personal story and demonstrating the positive impact that social assistance programs make upon families, communities, and our country. Yours is a vital story to tell.” I found Innocent a compelling page-turner as well. (Continue Reading)
THIS IS NOT A REVIEW BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
This is not a review of British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five stories of Music and Nightfall. It’s a meditation on impermanence inspired by his writing.
Mono no aware is the Japanese idea of the pathos of things, expressed by Ishiguro as sensitivity for a past that seeps into the present of his characters’ lives. Their lives exist as words on paper, bound up in paragraphs of unresolved melancholy, tied inextricably to the falling of the day. (Continue Reading)
11/23/15 ERIC D. GOODMAN INTERVIEW BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
I love traveling by train, ensconced with strangers boarding and debarking according to some mysterious and personal trajectory. So right from the start I was intrigued by Eric Goodman’s Tracks, a novel in short stories about travelers on a train headed from Baltimore for Chicago. (Continue Reading)
9-23-15 YOUR TEST OF CHARACTER(S)
This is only a test—a test of characters. There’s only one question with multiple answers to chose from. I hope you’ll have to think about your answer before you read mine. The question: Can you name a novel that has only one character? Choose one answer from among the following:
1. Life of Pi by Yan Martel
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
4. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
5. Downtown by Ed McBain (Continue Reading)
8/23/15 WORDS OF POWER. Words are the struck notes of the writer’s composition. Consider: “It is all excessive, violent, and at the same time full of tenderness.” These words appear on page twenty-four of To Live Within. Excessive. Violent. Tenderness. The words resonate individually and as a powerful chord hinting at the essence of being alive in Lizelle Reymond’s 1969 memoir.
In a book published last year, Robin Black plucks a power cord. “I always wanted to be powerful. In this decade, finally, I look powerful. I feel powerful. And I feel alone.” The repetition of the word establishes strength before the counter melody intrudes in Life Drawing: A Novel. (Continue Reading)
7/23/15 BASED ON A TRUE STORY. What does it mean—based on a true story? 
If the book I’m reading is nonfiction, my second brain puzzles over which details have been suppressed, fabricated, devised, or rearranged. If the book is fiction, it is sure to be followed by others’ speculations about the models for characters, locales, plots and careers found among the author’s family and acquaintances. (Continue Reading)
6-23-15 GLAMOR AND CLAIRVOYANCE IN NEWPORT
In her new novel Newport, Jill Morrow creates a mystery worthy of Masterpiece Theatre with unexpected and clever twists on the British model. One surprise is there is no crime and no death—until the gathering-of-the-suspects scene. And then there’s another surprise, and another.
It’s the 1920s and suave lawyer Adrian de la Noye is on a ferry to Newport. He’s on his way to an opulent sea view cottage, “beautiful in an old-fashioned, lavender-and-crepe sort of way,” at the insistence of his firm’s wealthiest client to draft a new will. At Adrian’s side is his awkward young colleague Jim Reid. (Continue Reading)
11/23/14 THAT LITTLE MAN IN YOUR HEAD BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
Google the word humunculus (or homunculus) for a definition of the “little man” and you’re sent spinning in a dozen directions from the alchemy of Paracelsus who was born the year after Columbus sailed for the New World, to Louise Erdrich’s 2001 The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse, to neurobiologist Christof Koch’s 2013 NPR interview. (Continue Reading)
SENSUAL IMPRESSIONS: A Confederacy of Dunces/The Master and Margarita
My husband and I were 23 and 22 when we visited New Orleans two months before John Kennedy Toole’s March 26, 1969, suicide.
I remember a quaint room off a garden with a wrought iron fence, the smokey power of Nat and Canonball Adderley’s jazz, and the tinny horns of old men who played for tips in narrow spaces between the clubs. This year, when I first read Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, the impression of sensual overload came rushing back. New Orleans is a city that doesn’t let go. (Continue Reading)