Category Archives: Culture

Reading Well: Milkman by Anna Burns

Posted on January 17, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Anna Burns‘ Milkman (2018) won the Man Booker Prize last year; as such, there are plenty of reviews of it to be found on the web (and is the second in back-to-back highly contemporary entries on Reading Well). I’ll just summarize … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: There There by Tommy Orange

Posted on January 6, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

There There (2018) has found its way onto several prominent end of year lists, which makes me feel quite au courant in this entry in Reading Well. It’s Tommy Orange‘s debut novel, and speaks–from about a dozen different perspectives–to the contemporary … Continue reading →

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@The Movies with PopPop: Roma

Posted on December 22, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Roma, a 2018 Netflix film written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is wonderful. It’s a story of an upper middle class household in Mexico City in the early 1970’s, and Cleo, the young woman who works for them as maid … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

You may have noticed that I usually don’t read mutli-volume entries in order. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (The Fifth Season [2015], The Obelisk Gate [2016], and The Stone Sky [2017]) is so good it made me break that rule, and … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I really loved Sing, Unburied, Sing and when I realized it was the third book of a loose trilogy (connected by geography, not by characters as far as I know), I got the other two books into my queue. Where the … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Trickster Books

Posted on November 25, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{I’m prepping for another class, and these are more a product of wanting to keep recording most everything I read here. These are very worthwhile books, each with a significant blindspot that, while important to consider, also does not reduce … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Two Short Story Collections

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I’ve written about both Jeff Vandermeer (The Southern Reach trilogy) and Sarah Hall (The Wolf Border, The Electric Michelangelo, and Daughters of the North) before. Vandermeer sits clearly in a post-Lovecraft tradition, somewhere between horror and the merely psychologically disturbing, a style … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

JD Vance‘s 2016 mid-life memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis generated quite a bit of buzz when published, and it’s pretty easy to see why, as Vance’s account of his upbringing in rural poverty is … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The sequel to Sleeping Giants , Waking Gods (2017) continues Sylvain Neuvel‘s story of human encounters with radically advanced technology. It follows the same structure: interviews and journal entries and transcribed conversations; and, again surprisingly to me, somehow it still … Continue reading →

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Reading Well: When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost by Joan Morgan

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I meant to read When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) along with Tricia Rose’s work. But the book was back-ordered, so I was unable to dive into Joan Morgan‘s manifesto until more recently. This … Continue reading →

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