The Daily Sabbatical
Music, Books, and Assorted Maunderings

Somewhat ironically The Daily Sabbatical has all but disappeared during my semester long sabbatical in NYC, but I haven't stopped reading, and I've just finished a book that more people should know about. It's a collection of three novellas, by Josh Weil, grouped under the title The New Valley. Weil recently was named on of the “top five under thirty-five” by the National Book Foundation, and… Read More

A lot has been said about this book and this writer: it was runner up for the NBA, and he's received a MacArthur grant and has been compared to Nabokov more times than Nabokov.  So, I'm sorta just adding my voice to the choir: this is a really good novel.  It combines an adventure story, a buddy novel, a historical fiction, and a potent reflection on immigration to the land of the allegedly free. The book flows from the project and ambition of it's narrator, Vladimir Brik: a Bosnian/American transplant who wants to write… Read More

Angela Carter is one of the lesser known literary wonders.  She's a sort of British, feminist Thomas Pynchon with a handy dab of Robert Coover mixed in.  I've read a few of her short stories, but not until Nights at the Circus has her genius been so apparent to me.  I'm now committed to reading everything she's written. Carter's "Nights" is a sort of hallucinogenic fairy-tale that takes us from London, through Petersburgh, and into the snowy depths… Read More

Cormac McCarthy has been awarded the PEN lifetime achievement award, very deservedly.  If you haven't read much CM, my favorites are Blood Meridian, Suttree, and The Road, but really you can't go wrong.  This guys one of the best american authors, if not the very best. Read More

I admit it. I check in on Amazon every now and again to see if A Dialogue on Consciousness ever rises above the 500,000th best selling book. Usually I enter "Alter Howell" as the search, but just to see, I entered Howell, and found that I appear far behind Hannah Howell who seems to be selling a lot more books.  I wonder, is it the cover?  Read More

My recent radio silence has been in part due to the fact that I seem to be incessantly busy with refereeing articles, grading papers, writing letters and evaluating applications of various sorts.  But that is not all.  Many of my previous posts have been inspired by the best of recent indie music, but in the new year I have let that interest lag considerably.  Instead, I have become obsessed with the "classical" tradition in music--to the point that I have taken up piano once again and have been studying music as though I were back in school.  Unfortunately, I'm simply not educated enough to write very informatively about much of this music.… Read More

A friend of mine once said that England and America are separated by a common language.  While not entirely sure what this means, I'm often surprised at how much the predominant sensibilities of the two countries differ.  We both have our forms of The Office, sure, and who doesn't love Hogwarts, but it is startling how many things fail to translate even though no actual translation needs to be done.  The works of Penelope Fitzgerald might be an example.  This woman had two books shortlisted for the Booker… Read More

Though I now feel myself to be a southerner by little more than birth, I have to admit a tendency to seek out and relish southern writers with something approximating a search for kinship.  After his last book of short stories landed him on the shortlist for the Pen/Faulkner award and his novel Serena was one of the most lauded books of the year, I thought it time to check out the Appalachian poet and author, Ron Rash.  In the end I wasn't disappointed so much as underwhelmed. Serena is the story of the… Read More

I recently read a story by Rick Bass in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology, my favorite book almost every year. I'd definitely heard of Bass--he's in the pantheon of America's short story writers--but till then I had never read him. It was a story about boys in Texas trying to turn a buck buying cattle, and I almost wept with laughter. I resolved to check this guy out, and though this story was from his new collection, The Lives of Rocks, anal retent that I am I had to start with his first book, The Watch, published… Read More

This seems to have been an especially strong year in fiction.  It seems as though every book I have read recently has merited enthusiastic jigs.  Perhaps I've simply become better at choosing what I read.  Who cares.  The result is that I'm a happy reader. Atmospheric Disturbances is a wow book.  It is a gift.  I had heard Rivka Galchen's name, and I had seen the book's striking cover, but I was not ready for such an excellent work.  I was, in fact, poised to hate this book.  It has an epigram… Read More