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To steal a name from that vast bookstore in Portland, Eugene is a city of books — and of readers. Our small local bookstores and excellent city library, not to mention free and inexpensive book sources such as Gertie the Bookbus and St. Vincent dePaul, ensure that Lane County’s literary lovers can have a book with their coffee or kombucha to curl up with this winter. Continue reading
fiction The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss. DAW Books, Inc., $18.95. Continue reading
Top 10 Books at Tsunami Books Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar Straus Giroux, $26. The Co-Creation Handbook by Alida Birch. Luminaire Press, $12.95. Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25. (See review this issue) Roadside Geology of Oregon, Second Edition by Marli B. Miller. Mountain Press, $26. (See review this issue) The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. Random House, $30. The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Plume, $16. Continue reading
The title of her new book is Falling from Horses, Oregon author Molly Gloss clarifies, not Falling off Horses. The preposition might seem to be a fine distinction, but Gloss says the title is meant as a metaphor — when you say falling off a horse, it is just about falling off a horse, she says. Continue reading
Many of the best graphic novels published this year detail stories of expanding frontiers. Some of these transgressed borders are physical, while others are spiritual or emotional. All of these books, however, celebrate the spirit of exploration that comics so vividly bring to life. Continue reading
Years before Opportunity Village came to life at the north end of Garfield Street, the idea of a transitional tiny house community was percolating in Andrew Heben’s head. While writing his senior thesis at the University of Cincinnati on the value of tent cities, Heben lived for a month at Camp Take Notice, a forested tent camp in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in which residents were involved in a complex process of self-governance. Continue reading
Four historical narratives, Russian fatalism and strong ties to his family’s pioneering and Native American heritage drive Howard W. Robertson’s newest work, Peculiar Pioneer. He and several other local writers will be reading from their recent work Sunday, Sept. 28, at the inaugural Lane Writer’s Reading Series event. Continue reading
On a summer day, standing with your toes in the sun-warmed sand of an Oregon beach, you’d be hard pressed to look out across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean and feel anything resembling danger. But out in that ocean, where the water turns from glassy green to dark blue, lurks something powerful — and if you listen maybe you can hear it in the roar of the waves. Continue reading
In a scene about two-thirds of the way through his debut memoir The Wax Bullet War (Ooligan Press. 2014. $16.95), Sean Davis finds himself standing — hungover and “clouded with drugs”— on a stage at Walker Middle School in Salem, Oregon. Davis, who only months before had been critically injured by an IED attack in Iraq, an attack that also claimed the life of his closest friend, is at the school to share some of his experiences, as well as to generate support for the troops who are still deployed. Continue reading
“I couldn’t believe how stupid I was,” writes comedian Moshe Kasher in his new memoir Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 (allusions to the Salinger teen-angst classic fully intended). Kasher brings his act to WOW Hall April 17. “It seemed like, in the face of the most obvious answers in the world,” he continues, “I always chose the dumbest thing to do. It was like I wasn’t in control of my own brain.” Continue reading