Monday, April 30, 2018

North Toward Home by Willie Morris

North Toward Home by Willie Morris was a memoir from the southern writer who died in 1999 at the age of 64 and the book split into three parts, with the first about his youth in Yazoo City, Mississippi, second his time in school at the University of Texas, and third on living in New York City for work.

The section about his life growing up in small-town Mississippi stood out as particularly interesting and very much had what the journalist Wright Thompson described as a great description of place provided by Morris. The Yazoo City Experience was compelling to read about and featured things such high school football, American legion baseball, playing the trumpet at military funerals, and listening to baseball broadcasts before others in town and then pretending to guess the events.

Morris in the later sections of the book wrote about politics in Texas, including it's unseemly underbelly, and then the casual indifference to suffering that he saw while living in New York City. He then returned to the South, and was living in Jackson, Mississippi, some half an hour north of Yazoo City, at the time of his death.

Saturday, April 28, 2018

City of Thieves by David Benioff

City of Thieves by David Benioff was an entertaining novel from someone best known for being the co-creator of Game of Thrones and the book set in 1942 Leningrad, a city under siege by the Germans, with a population struggling desperately to survive.

It was a solid read and an interesting construct Benioff used was to begin things in present-day America, with someone being told by his grandfather the personal story of what happened many decades ago while a young man in Russia.