Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

I've just finished reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman which I'd put off reading it until just recently. Even before all the bad reviews, it seemed to me like the book was a cash/publicity/marketing grab by the publishers. You've always got to wonder why something wasn't published way back when. Why did the author and/or publisher sit on it for decades? The answer is usually simple: it wasn't that good. But mainly, I didn't want to read Go Set a Watchman because I didn't want to ruin the special place To Kill a Mockingbird has in my heart. My main takeaway after having read it -- and after reading a few reviews -- is that it's sad that Harper Lee didn't write more/publish more. She obviously had a gift.  If nothing else, Watchman confirmed for me, at least, that Mockingbird wasn't a fluke. Lee had a rich, deep, measured voice in a dark time of American history that would have been a welcome inclusion to the canon of 1960s civil...

I've just finished reading Marilynne Robinson's Home . If you know nothing about Marilynne Robinson, know that her first book, Housekeeping , considered a modern classic, won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award; her second book, Gilead , won the Pulizer along with a slew of other awards; and then there's Home , winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Orange Prize. In a book review published in The Independent , Salley Vickers writes, "Home is not a novel in which plot matters. Like Jane Austen, but in a different key, Robinson's intent focus is the super-subtleties of human exchange. The heart of this utterly absorbing, precisely observed, marvellous novel is the fumbling inadequacy of love, its inability to avert our terrible capacity to wound and maim, not even but especially, those nearest and dearest to us." It took me a month and a half to read Home . That's in part due to the fact that our book club did a meet-and-greet in early April,...