book bum: what i’m reading…
ask any of my closest friends and they’ll confess my morbid fascination about all things death and dying. i was first in line at the bodies exhibit, i once wanted to festoon my walls with rosemary’s baby paintings (i have since been regulated by the girls) and i absorbed both of mary roach’s stiff and spook, so imagine my joy to come across lisa takeuchi cullen’s remember me. journalist lisa cullen traveled across the country to discover the curious and fascinating funeral rites and rituals. folks no longer want to take death lying down; instead, they’re taking their demise into their own hands and planning the after-party.
From the book: Cullen tours the country’s first “green” cemetery in South Carolina, meets a mummification advocate at his pyramid in Utah, and visits the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Colorado. She crashes a Hmong funeral in Minneapolis and a tango funeral in Washington, D.C.
i started this masterpiece six years ago and i hadn’t had the patience for the disjointed dialogue, the unstructured narrative, the extreme characters. now i dare say that i wish this was the novel i could write, if i possessed even a fraction of didion’s genius.
about the book: In this Conradian masterpiece of American innocence and evil set in the fictional Central American country of Boca Grande, two American women face the harsh realities, political and personal, of living on the edge in a land with an uncertain future. Writing with her signature telegraphic swiftness, the author creates a terrifying commentary on an age of conscienceless authority.
on the horizon? joe meno’s the boy detective, wendy spero’s memoir, a return to calvino, a biography of woolf, and more green reading…
AND Elizabeth Merrick, of course!
