what I’ve been reading recently

-East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. Beautiful language, and much, much better than Grapes of Wrath. Lots of drama and intrigue, plus, it’s about California, which is interesting, now that I live here.
-Once Removed, by Mako Yoshikawa. Yoshikawa will be my lit professor this fall, so I thought I’d check out her book. I [...]

San Francisco update

Just some tidbits since my last post…
We spent the weekend at Lake Tahoe with some friends and Remington Steele, the cutest puppy ever. The weather was fabulous — sunny, warm, and dry — and the hiking, hot tubbing, and Mexican train domino playing were excellent. The gambling, not so much.
Last night I attended a Giants [...]

Asian leanings

Our bookshelves, when I was growing up, housed a small Japanese-English dictionary. I don’t know where it came from; certainly my parents had no special interest in Japan or, for that matter, foreign languages. But I did.
As a child I memorized the words in a Spanish-English picture dictionary, especially the ones for animals: el pero, [...]

back to work

I’ve started working on the Korea book again. I revised and added to a chapter today — my first attempt at working on the project since early July. It felt good to accomplish something, since the book, particularly my lack of progress on it, has been weighing on me considerably. Keeping up momentum definitely keeps [...]

Korea scrapbook

I have many pictures from my time in Korea, and back then I also hoarded all sorts of other papers, postcards, stamps, tickets, matchbooks and other souvenirs from places that I traveled to, restaurants I visited, trains that I took. I had the wherewithal to combine all of these reminders of a year spent in [...]

Boston summer recap

It’s been a while since my last update. I had visitors three weeks in a row, so I was doing a lot of sightseeing, eating and drinking on top of attending class and getting all of my reading done. So pretty much no writing has occurred in the past three-plus weeks, something I plan to [...]