What's in Dave's Head

When our kids were young, we had DEAR time: Drop Everything and Read. It’s still a good practice, and not just for kids. This is Memorial Day weekend, which means the beginning of summer – psychologically, if not meteorologically. It’s a great time to slow down and get drawn into a good book. Here’s a synopsis of what I’ve been reading lately. Let me know what books you’ve had your nose in, and what you’ve especially liked. Fiction   Pedro Paramo , Juan Rulfo — A surreal masterpiece, this 1955 novel is considered Mexico’s greatest and most influential literary work. Its style is deceptively simple but requires the reader’s full focus to figure out who’s who. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that  Pedro Paramo  was the inspiration for his equally masterful (and equally surreal)  One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nostromo , Joseph Conrad — A brilliant novel about corruption. I loved this book that has it all — intrigue, betrayal, revolution, love, jealousy, and incredib...

Donna and I just returned from a week in Paris – and it was spectacular. France hadn’t been on my bucket list. First off, there’s the whole foreign language thing. Not my forte, in the same range that brain surgery isn’t my forte. Then there's the reputation of French inhospitableness, particularly toward Americans. If I’m not wanted, don’t worry, I’ll stay away. Finally, I imagined it as a snooty, glitzy, high-end-fashion kind of place – you know, movie stars, swimming pools – out of my comfort zone. We ended up going to fulfill a dream of Donna’s: Not so much of seeing Paris (she had done so years ago on a high-school trip), but of seeing Yundi Li, a 40-year-old Chinese pianist, give a performance there. The language barrier turned out to be manageable. Donna took eight years of French in school and was using Pimsleur to bone up. I started using the online app too – though at the introductory level. In real life, I could have gotten by without Donna’s near fluency because mos...