Minnesota Reads

His Holiness, by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, is the third biography I have read on John Paul II (JPII), the former leader of the Roman Catholic Church (Garry O'Connor's Universal Father and George Weigel's Witness to Hope were the other two). Weigel's book, a 1056 page behemoth complete with two sections of color pictures, [...]

I’m pretty late to the Malcolm Gladwell fanclub, but after reading Outliers I feel pretty nicely ensconced. It’s not often that I read non-fiction, I tend to find it a little dry and too teachy. While there’s a lot to learn from Outliers, the writing is so conversational and smooth that you feel like you’re [...]

Somewhere Christa is squealing with delight at the fact that Charles Baxter has answered these six questions. She’s a fan. You might know Baxter from novels like Saul and Patsy, Feast of Love, or his latest, The Soul Thief. Many might recognize him as the man who wrote Burning Down the House, a book of [...]

John Niven is what would happen if Nick Hornby got into a terrible car crash and punctured the lobe where politeness lives. I had a heck of a time getting into his novel Kill Your Friends, since I’m not exactly fluent in vitriol. It is pages and pages of a man angrily screaming British slang [...]

What an unusual book. Even for a graphic novel, Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is unlike anything I ever read before. I picked it up because Shapton mentioned Big Star’s song “Thirteen” in her Largehearted Boy Book Notes [...]

Kent Nerburn?s Neither Wolf Nor Dog is the 1994 account of a journey he took from his Bemidji home to the Black Hills of western South Dakota. This journey started when an Indian elder named Dan summoned Nerburn, to write a book for him. This book was to contain Dan?s intimate thoughts and feelings that [...]

Indescribable and hard to put down, Martin Millar's novel is complex and witty with a sharp edge of social consciousness. Perhaps Neil Gaiman described it most accurately in his introduction. “This has to do with other fairies (of all nationalities) of New York, not to mention the poor repressed fairies of Britain� It has a [...]

In Jay McInerney’s world, men are writers with varying degrees of success. They are married to women who are pregnant, which may or may not stall their philandering. The wife typically knows what’s up and either ignores it, aborts the child, or asks the man to have his fairly healthy cat put to sleep as [...]

If you pay close attention to the calendar, you know that poet Tim Nolan did a whole lot of reading all over town earlier this winter. He was supporting his first book of poetry, The Sound of It, published in October. Nolan’s poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, and Ploughshares. Plus, his [...]

Minneapolis' own Steve Hagen wrote Buddhism Plain & Simple in 1997 to provide an overview of the religion that was free of “the fetters and cultural trappings that have accumulated over twenty-five centuries” (5). Buddhism Plain & Simple did live up to its name. Throughout the book, Hagen made it evident that Buddhism is about [...]