A Good Man is Hard to Find

Esquire recently published a list of "75 Books Every Man Should Read."

Only one of the seventy-five was written by a woman.

P.S. Somebody else post something.



(I assume it's obvious which book it was.)

Infinite Rest

"Did you see that David Foster Wallace committed suicide? I wasn't all that familiar with his work, but I know he was considered a very gifted writer. They didn't come out and say so in the obits, but he certainly sounded bipolar."

I did minimal research, as I'd never read him either:

"I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering… We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.” - DFW

Needless to say, I want to.

But I won't. At least not for awhile. It's so tacky to discover an author this way, you know?

Brown Sugar

"What I remember then was Reenie, from when we were little. It was Renie who’d done the bandaging, of scrapes and cuts and minor injuries: Mother might be resting, or doing good deeds elsewhere, but Reenie was always there. She’d scoop us up and sit us on the white enamel kitchen table, alongside the pie dough she was rolling out or chicken she was cutting up or the fish she was gutting, and give us a lump of brown sugar to get us to close our mouths. Tell me where it hurts, she’d say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where.
But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling."
- Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin