Reading Lists - A Great American Novel - All I Got Done Tonight

 My 10 favorite reads of 2025 (so far) (Austin Kleon) - I highly recommend subscribing to Mr. Kleon's Substack.

Summer Reads 2025 (Granta) - this one will expand your mind; just reading the choices broke my brains.

15 Novels in Translation You Should be Reading This Summer and Fall - let us not be parochial, the sure sign of a petty mind.

Librarians Recommend 8 Books that Changed the Shape of Politics and Reading in America (Electric Literature) - I must admit that I have only read Maus, but that is a brilliant work.

Modernist Blondes by Marlowe Granados (Paris Review)

Anita Loos began writing Gentleman Prefer Blondes as a joke on her unrequited paramour, the editor and Algonquin Table alum H. L. Mencken. Out of spite for the genius’s “palpably unjust” penchant for blondes, Lorelei Lee—perhaps the blonde all blondes are unconsciously measured up to—was born. The novel is often remembered as an artifact of the Jazz Age full of prohibition liquor and loose morals, and, stylistically, it displays the kind of lighthearted play that more writers could experiment with only if they took themselves less seriously. Loos, in her “Biography of the Book,” states that as she began to write the beginnings of the novel on a train, she approached writing it “not bitterly, as I might have done had I been a real novelist, but with an amusement which was, on the whole, rather childish.” Two gold-digging flappers taking Europe by storm sounds like the perfect twenties romp, but for those with sharp minds, there was more than meets the eye. At the time of publication, Edith Wharton and William Faulkner were gushing fans, with Wharton calling it “the great American novel.” It is unfortunate that Blondes was published the same year as The Great Gatsby and is now greatly overshadowed by the latter’s legacy. There’s an argument to be made that, if Loos and her characters were slightly less glamorous (and less feminine), perhaps the novel would have been remembered as a prominent example of a modernist text.

I have always preferred Dorothy (Jane Russell) to Lorelei, but I am thinking I need to read the novel. 

After going to the grocery, I was out of energy again. Shortness of breath and a funny feeling around my heart put me to sleep for almost 2 hours. I did make a few, minor changes to "No Ordinary Word". Business needing tended to has slipped away from me.

Ted Gioia has a good answer to his question, Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing?

I admit to never having bought a Jonathan Richman record for all I like whatever I have heard of his music. Pitchfork reviews Jonathan Richman: Only Frozen Sky Anyway. Good to know he is still out there.

Jonathan Richman has spent the better part of his five-plus-decade career as a sunny, reassuring presence on the fringes of American rock, rhapsodizing about the mundane rhythms of everyday life. He never came close to the Billboard charts but his cult was big enough to edge into the mainstream. When the Farrelly brothers needed a friendly face to defuse the raunchiness of 1998’s There’s Something About Mary, they asked Richman to serve as the comedy’s Greek chorus; alone among alternative-minded singer-songwriters of the era, he radiated unabashed humor and unguarded emotion.

Given Richman’s customary gentleness, it’s genuinely disconcerting hearing him sing about mortality. “When I make my transition, I want everyone to know I only changed positions,” he sings at the outset of Only Frozen Sky Anyway, his 18th studio album—an acknowledgement that the 74-year-old singer-songwriter has accepted the inevitability (if not the finality) of his eventual passage from this particular astral plane.

Why what made America great is its democracy:

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