Collected Poems in English / Joseph Brodsky, many translators, including Brodsky, 539 pp.

When I started this long book I found Brodsky's poetry challenging but assumed that after a couple of hundred pages I would get better at reading it. Practice makes perfect, but alas, not here.  These works remained challenging until the last page; reading them was like the sensation of squinting at a sign that's too far away to read.  Occasional glimmers of meaning come through but the whole is out of reach.

I didn't waste my time, though.  For one thing, the sheer variety of topics Brodsky treats is astonishing.  There's love:

...sleep's entanglements would put to shame
whatever depths the analysts might;
that when my lips blew out the candle flame,
her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
                                       to join my own, without another thought.

And the Presentation at the Temple:

The Temple enclosed them in forests of stone.
Its lofty vaults stooped as though trying to cloak
the prophetess Anna, and Simeon, and Mary - 

And Mexico:

Good old Mexico City.
Marvelous place to kill an 
evening.  The heart is empty;
but Time still flows like tequila.

And from the almanac-style History of the Twentieth Century (a Roadshow) for 1908:

Also, the first Model T is out
in Dearborn to roam our blissful quarters
trailed by the news that General Motors
is incorporated.  The English Edward
And Russia's Nicholas make an effort 
to know each other aboard a yacht.

Seemingly Brodsky's poetry contains the whole universe; I am glad to have grasped a few of the glimmers.

Bucky F*cking Dent

Bucky F*cking Dent by David Duchovny, 296 pages

Thirty-something self-described loser and Yankee Stadium peanut vendor Ted has always had a fraught relationship with his father, Marty, a retired womanizing advertising executive and a lifelong Red Sox fan. (Is that the reason Ted works for and supports the Yankees, despite having the middle name of Fenway? Probably doesn't hurt.) Father and son haven't talked for five years when Ted is summoned to the hospital, where he learns that Marty is in the final stages of lung cancer. Ted moves home and is determined to figure out where their relationship went wrong. The whole book is set against the 1978 American League fight for the playoffs between the Red Sox and Yankees (a LOT of Sox fans felt that that was their year, and in the book, Marty is convinced that he's immortal until October, "when the Sox win it all.").

Duchovny offers up a good exploration of both the father-son dynamic, as well as the role that baseball plays in the American psyche. A great book to read as the MLB season kicks off.

Fresh off the boat

Fresh off the boat: a memoir / Eddie Huang 276 pgs.

Eddie Huang has a great immigrant story.  Well, actually he is a first generation American but with plenty of family ties to Taiwan.  His dad was a bit of a gangster there but came to America and ended up a successful restaurant owner.  Eddie and his two brothers were no coddled and learned to kick the ass of anyone who made Chinese jokes about them or taunted them for being different.  Eddie is a bit of a gangster himself.  He does well in school if he can just stay long enough instead of getting kicked out for fighting, etc.  He is a troublemaker but much in the "boys will be boys" way.  He is willing to hustle.  He is now the owner of a very popular New York restaurant.

This is kind of a hip hop memoir but great fun to read and perhaps not always serious.  The cover reveals a lot about Eddie and I enjoyed every page of this book.

My Beloved World

My Beloved World / Sonia Sotomayor 340 pgs.

This memoir from Justice Sotomayor tells an amazing story of a young  Puerto Rican girl who grew up in the Bronx in a loving but very poor family.  Her father died when she was young leaving her mother to raise her and her brother.  Sotomayor was diagnosed at a very young age with type 1 diabetes...a disease that she always assumed would lead to an early death.  Regardless, her determination and grit helped her excel in school and get accepted to Princeton and Yale.

I have to say, I checked this out on a whim and was very moved by her story, her candor and her amazing accomplishments.  She seems very humble and also very fun, I assume she and RBG are having a good time at the Supreme Court.

The outsiders

The Outsiders / S. E. Hinton 221 pgs.

This classic young adult book features Ponyboy, the youngest of three brothers whose parents died in a wreck.  Their world is split into Greasers and Socs and the two don't mix well.  When friend Johnny is beaten by a gang, he is scared and wants to make sure it never happens again.  He and Ponyboy are caught alone by a larger group and in the end, a teen is killed.  The path following the death is harrowing.  Nobody wanted something so serious to happen but it can't be changed now.  The timeless themes of fitting in/not fitting in and figuring out who you are make this a great book even after all these years.

Seeing Red

Seeing Red by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell, 157 pages

In this autobiographical novel, Meruane details how complications from a chronic illness left her essentially blind, able to see only the dark red blood from burst veins in her eyes. Told in a deliberately disorienting style, Meruane details the initial panic of not seeing, the awkward visits to doctors, the trip home to Chile to visit her family, the incessant fumbling through life to figure out how to be blind. It's illuminating, and made this reader infinitely grateful that my eyes work just fine.

The Door

The Door by Magda Szabo, 262 pages.
This Hungarian tale from the 1980s tells the story of a cleaning woman and her employer.
Emerence is a woman out of myth. She serves as a cleaning woman for and Magda (the character, not the author) and her husband. She refers to Magda's husband simply as "the master." Emerence is a force to be reckoned with; she is unwavering, unforgiving, and unstoppable. She cannot understand why anyone would waste time reading, let alone writing books, as Magda does. But Emerence comes to love Magda, as she loves Viola, the stray dog she foists upon Magda's household, and as she loves her privacy, her endless collection of cats, and her secrets. Emerence stands for everything that has passed and faded; for an old Hungary out of fable, and for the endless stoicism needed to survive both the war and the Soviets. She cannot be explained or reasoned with. But she can be disappointed and betrayed by those whom she loves. This is a wonderful book.

Into the Wild

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, 207 pages

In September of 1992, hikers found the emaciated body of Christopher McCandless in an abandoned bus just outside Denali National Park. He had died of starvation a few weeks earlier, more than three months after walking into the wilderness with the intention of living off the land. In Into the Wild, Krakauer examines the two years leading up to McCandless' death, in which the privileged college grad left everything behind and hitchhiked across the country. It's a revealing portrait of a kid that many may dismiss as foolhardy or even arrogant, particularly considering the information that made it into the media after his body was discovered. It's well worth a read though, because I'd bet that almost everyone will in some way see a bit of themselves in McCandless, or in those whose lives he touched.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell, 324 pages.
Voyager I and Voyager II were both launched in 1977 to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment. Once every 176 years, the outer planets of our solar system line up in such a way that a probe launched from Earth could, in one go, fly a path Voyager I launched on September 5, 1977 and flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Each flight path had to be meticulously plotted, taking into account the trajectory past each planet, slingshotting towards the craft's next destination, while obtaining the most data possible as each planet and moon was flown past, all while keeping in communication with Earth. Voyager I flew by Jupiter and its moons, Io, Ganymede, and Callisto, before continuing on to Saturn and its moons, including a close pass by Titan. Voyager II had a similar flight path, but if Voyager I had a successful pass by Titan (as it did), Voyager II would use energy from passing closer to Saturn and continue on towards Uranus and Neptune. Bell tells of his personal interactions with Voyager, from watching the news in 1977, to small astronomy-related jobs in college in 1980, to professional and friendly conversations with Voyager team members in his roles as a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell, and as President of the Planetary Society. The Voyager missions discovered many things, moons reformed to a smooth surface by unknown forces, rings around Uranus and eruptions and ultracold cryovolcanic flows on distant icy moons. A fascinating book.

The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry

The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry by John Feinstein, 404 pages.

So this is a book for you if have an interest in Duke basketball, North Carolina (University) basketball, North Carolina State basketball, any of the coaches in the title, any of their legions of famous players over the years, or if you just like reading the works of John Feinstein. And he is a pretty good writer; almost every vignette he relates comes across as very interesting, even if at its core it's not. I found over the course of this book that I don't care all that much about North Carolina (the entire state) and its basketball teams, and would have preferred to read these gems as the individual magazine pieces that they seem they should be; other than the fact that these teams play each other several times each and every year of the thirty-some years this book covers, and that each of these coaches (like their predecessors and those that follow them) would prefer to defeat the other, there's not really a sustaining narrative.And everything and everyone in the book, for those thirty years, with the exception of Valvano when he is on his deathbed, is consumed by college basketball.