Category: Reader
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Ice, Isolation, and Solitude
I. On Friday, the snow started falling and falling, but it was soft and dry, unusual for the Portland area. The ice came quickly after in some areas, which is not so unusual. The snow in my back yard remained about a foot deep. The city is famously ill-equipped for dealing with snow, but no…
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Sci-Fi Facing Backward
For decades, genre fiction of all kinds—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance, and historical fiction—was relegated to the pulp racks and considered beneath the notice of serious readers. Many of these books, while fun, were not masterpieces, and the few that could have been considered masterpieces—maybe a Ray Bradbury novella or an Ursula le Guin series—were disdained…
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Donna Tartt, Queen of Punctuation
My friend Carly, who knows how my brain works and can wind my literary obsessions up like a toy, told me over dinner one night that she had decided that Donna Tartt was the queen of punctuation. She was reading The Secret History for the first time, though it was Carly herself who had insisted…
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How Many Licks
The Science and History of the Healing Power of Dog Licks When it started, I thought my ten-year-old dog, Danny, had a sore hip. He was trying desperately not to limp on our walks and even in the house. He’s old but he’s active, and he’d been running more with me in the fall of…
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Digital vs Physical Media
How I’ve decided to consume media and support creators Last summer, City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty was on sale for something like two bucks for Kindle. I had heard good things about the book, so I picked it up and eventually got around to reading it. Not only did I love it, but…
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The Nouveau Commonplace
I learned a few months ago that the word “commonplace” has an older meaning than the current definition of something being so common it’s no longer interesting. It’s the kind of word you’d think hipsters would use more often than they do. But a commonplace is also a notebook where you write down quotes and…