Read A Book A Week
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Carto’s Recent Posts
- Earthsea — Dragons and Wizards
- Flowers on Note Cards
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- The Thinker Waits
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- Favorites 2017 — Transition to Winter
- Transformation — Land’s End turns chilly
- Peek — Halloween in Palo Alto
- Stanford at Night
Carto’s Most Viewed Posts
- Téa Obreht—Tigers, Myths and Death Rites In The Balkans
- Zero To Hero — Donna Tartt spins a murder tale in Vermont
- Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch Unchained
- About Carto
- Collective Bargaining in Butte Montana
- Blue Dogs in my Dreams
- Georgia: An Echo of Chain Gang Justice
- Happy New Year—Has The Harry Potter Series Really Ended?
- Day-By-Day-2011
- John Irving—Twisted River, A Writer Drifts Through Life
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Posts Organized by Category
Category Archives: Fiction
Earthsea — Dragons and Wizards
Sheltering at home gives me extra time for reading— I read in English some books I first read while studying Spanish: 100 Years of Solitude, Love in the time of Cholera, Death in the Andes, etc. Now, I’m turning to … Continue reading
Posted in Fantasy/Adventure, Fiction, Other, Photography, Speculative Fiction
Tagged Charles Vess, Coloring, Illustration, Photoshop CC, Ursula K. Le Guin
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Donna Tartt — The Goldfinch Unchained
The Goldfinch is a very small oil painting of a finch chained to its perch that is on display in a museum in the Netherlands. It was painted 300 years ago by a student of Rembrandt and is very famous. … Continue reading
Posted in eBook, Fiction
Tagged American Literature, Donna Tartt, Mauritshuis museum, Netherlands, postaweek, The Goldfinch
8 Comments
Colombian Storyteller, García Márquez, is dead at 87
Gabriel García Márquez is dead at 87; he is survived by his stories, and his many readers. In his autobiography García Márquez told this story of a surprise visit by his mother: My mother asked me to go with her … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction, Memoir, Spanish, Translation
Tagged Edith Grossman, García Márquez, postaweek
1 Comment
Zero To Hero — Donna Tartt spins a murder tale in Vermont
Murdered—Bunny is dead. He’s lying there at the foot of Mt. Cataract buried by a fateful April snow: “He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history— … Continue reading
Posted in Crime novel, Fiction, Mystery, Poetry
Tagged A. E. Housman, American Literature, Bennington College, Donna Tartt, Hampden College, postaweek, The Secret History, Vermont
2 Comments
Jonah — Biblical Story Made Modern
Today, the gleaming towers of Las Vegas have eclipsed the great American desert of southern Nevada. Author Joshua Max Feldman remembers an older, more primitive time in the epigraph of his novel The Book of Jonah: —and Jonah saw in … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction, Poetry
Tagged American Literature, Jonah, Joshua Max Feldman, Judith, Las Vegas, postaweek, The Old Testament
1 Comment
Doris Lessing: Reluctant Feminist
Posted on the web: “Goodbye to Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook wouldn’t be the same without you.” The posting by the Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock included a link to the obituary published by the N.Y. Times: Doris Lessing, the … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction
Tagged Doris Lessing, Nobel Lecture, postaweek, The Golden Notebook, Working Women
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Rowling– A Celebrity Falls In London’s Mayfair
It was a dark and stormy night (for it is in London that our scene lies)— the supermodel Lula Landry lies dead on the sidewalk below the balcony of her luxurious Mayfair apartment: Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by … Continue reading
Posted in Crime novel, Fiction, Poetry
Tagged Afghanistan, Birds, British, JK Rowling, London, Police, postaweek, PTSD
1 Comment
Elmore Leonard– The Old West of Lawmen and Outlaws
Elmore Leonard wrote about the old west–Arizona Territory, 1860. His early short stories were about the Apache, cowboys, sheriff deputies, stage-coach drivers and, of course, gun-toting outlaws. In 1953, Leonard was working as an advertising copywriter when he published “Three-Ten … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction, Movie
Tagged American Literature, Elmore Leonard, postaweek, Western
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China Girl on an Italian Motorcycle
The opening scene of The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner takes place near the Isonzo River in northern Italy during the First World War, 1917. An Italian motorcyclist called Valera is fighting an anonymous German trooper hand-to-hand after the cyclist stopped … Continue reading
Chess — A Woman In A Man’s World
American Chess Grandmasters Susan Polgar and Gata Kamsky in tournament play. Two Grandmasters plan their moves as the battle for domination of the chessboard begins—Polgar has played her queen pawn two squares and Kamsky echoed her move. If Polgar moves … Continue reading
