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2023 Booklist and Recommendations (with links)

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  Reading Capote's In Cold Blood between typewriting poems for folks at the Three Village Farmers Market in Setauket, NY Am I obliged to start every New Year's reading list/recap with shock at the passage of time?  I think I won't, although I'll comment on that inevitability a little later... 2023 Reading list: Counting plays and individual trade paperbacks, I read nearly 80 books in 2023.   Clearly, reading is an obsession for me. Escapism. Learning. ADHD-prompted insatiability for novelty (pardon the pun, and pardon saying “pardon the pun” I loathe it.)   Part of it is also the desire to flesh out my imagined expansive private study/library, a fantasy I’ve harbored since I first saw Disney’s Beauty and The Beast.   Sometimes the books and their particulars linger long after, other times they fade leaving only a line of dialogue, or clever twist, or concept or brilliant structure that stays with me.   Often, I jump hungrily to the next book the very same day. This
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Reading List 2022

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Happy New Year! 2022 Reading List  Recovering from my ACL surgery in May, reading McCarthy's brutal "Child of God" Here comes the annual reading list! For 2022 I read the most books in a year that I ever have (68). Some of this personal record breaking reading was owing to my 2 month convalescence after tearing my ACL in late April where books and comics saved my sanity (or thankfully transported my agonized consciousness.) I discovered a couple of new authors that I couldn't get enough of (I was made aware of the playwright August Wilson and the author Kent Haruf this year and I devoured their oeuvre insatiably.  I got back into Dennis Lehane in a big way as well.)   I realized during the school year I impulse-buy and read a lot of books to distract myself from the mundanity of the school work. (I currently am swearing off buying books for the new year, a resolution I clearly failed to adhere to in 2022.) I don’t usually record the poetry books I read (nor do i read
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The Empowering Nature of Willpower

The Empowering Nature Of Willpower Lessons spurred by Cormac McCarthy & Jocko Willink   "But more than one of his friends describes McCarthy as a "chameleon, able to adjust easily to any surroundings and company because he seems so secure in what he will and will not do."   I came across this description of Cormac McCarthy in a 1992 article in New York Times by Richard B. Woodward . The article precedes McCarthy's masterful elegiac Western,  All The Pretty Horses . The novel was his first widely celebrated success and kicked off his Border Trilogy , which to my mind, is one of the greatest trilogies in fiction. The quote shook me. This depiction of the elusive author speaks to the power of self-awareness and the comfort of self-identity.  It says much of the equanimity born of a relationship of trust with oneself brought about by discipline. Ex-Marine turned motivation speaker Jocko Willink's counterintuitive credo,   "DISCIPLINE EQUALS FREEDOM" fl
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2020 Book List and Recommendations

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 2021 has arrived!  Somehow, we survived 2020.  I suspect in large part via escapism, at least for me, was responsible for being delivered sanely through this year of chaos.   2020 was another year where I only posted twice on a blog I keep telling myself I'll make regular weekly posts on.   Where'd ya get em? About half a dozen books I read were ones that were assigned for classes ("Art Work", "Highbrow Lowbrow" "The Essentials Of Journalism" "The Home Place", "To Love The Wind and The Rain" to name a few).  I've decided to actually read through the entire books that are assigned in my classes, to seriously ensconce myself in the information and mentality of the Journalism degree I'm working towards at Stony Brook University.  A few books ( Hate Inc. and The Missing Year Of Juan Salvatierra and "The Three Paradoxes" ) were sent to me as surprised by my pen pal.  His music, book and movie recommendations are a
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The Power of Artistry (and art's poignancy in quarantine)

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Hello AllOne Family, I hope this message finds you safe, healthy and wonderfulfilled. Yesterday I was reading the transcript of Alan Moore's brilliant performance piece "Snakes & Ladders" (incredibly recommended, though esoteric reading). His words are accompanied in the offering by the multimedia visual artist Eddie Campbell. Afterwards, I was watching an excerpt of an interview with the great Alan Moore where he shares some important insight into the power that artists once had, specifically in the bardic and satire traditions. (Here's another link to the interview segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LYgkN2Ajmk ) Moore then infers this empowering historical truth could have great import for modern artists. "If artists actually remembered the power that they used to have, then I think that...if they treated their art as if it were magic... if they gave their creativity the respect that they would give a God, then I think th
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2019 Book List and Recommendations

Welcome to the year 2020! I don't think I'll ever get used to how futuristic that sounds!  Much to my consternation I realized while typing up this annual book list, that I haven't made an entry here on blogger since last January.  When I consider that, and my intentions for the various writing series that I intended on and my list of blog topics and ideas... it seems to me that the year flew by, although of course it did not.  It never does, we just perceive the time differently in relation to what we've got going on externally and internally. As of the day I'm writing this, I have now finished my first year back at school, at Stony Brook University, where I'm working toward my Bachelors in Journalism.  You'll note that I've read a lot of non-fiction (or a lot more than usual for me) and much of it is of a more sober, academic nature.  I hadn't a lot of time to read as I was so entrenched in academia and so many of these books were experienced a
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