Last post of the year!
One of my great expectations as any holiday approaches is the found time to read more, and this year has not disappointed. Since I would be spending Christmas and New Year's days on another coast, I knew that the vacation would begin the moment I passed security at Newark Airport's Terminal C and settled into a seat at the waiting area of my departure gate to read. The cross-country flight would grant me another six hours of uninterrupted reading. Then I anticipated more late-night or early-morning opportunities during a stay on the dunes near Monterey and hills of Oakland.
I recently bought at a bargain price the Library of America's boxed set of all 14 Kurt Vonnegut novels, spanning 45 years, from 1952 to 1997, because I wanted to rediscover why I was so caught up in the Vonnegut mystique of the early 1970s, when I was a college student. I've gotten through Player Piano (1952), a disjointed but revelatory critique of the dystopia that would emerge when machines replace human labor and engineers and managers run everything, and The Sirens of Titan (1959), a slapstick space travel odyssey about wealth, greed, and vanity.
Then sometimes you get an unexpected gift, as I did on Christmas Eve when browsing East Bay Booksellers on College Avenue in the Rockridge section of Oakland, California. I picked up Again, the Dawn: Selected Poems, 1976 - 2022 by Grace Schulman. Schulman, a recent recipient of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in American Poetry and a Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, where she has taught for 50 years. As one of her early students, I was greatly influenced by her teaching style and writing, as I mentioned in a previous post. This latest Schulman book collects 127 poems from all nine of her volumes, standing as a testament to an extraordinary career, which I hope is far from over.
So here I am, switching between Vonnegut and Schulman, returning to writers I discovered a half-century ago. But I am also reading newer writers, mostly nonfiction, as I've noted in previous posts here. What are you reading during your downtime?
