About...

 
A professional critic for more than two decades, Jerome Weeks is the arts producer-reporter for KERA, the NPR/PBS station for Dallas-Fort Worth. Before that, he was the theater critic and then the book columnist for The Dallas Morning News ... more

Book/daddy's site ponders writing from papyrus to paper to pixels -- with occasional forays into vellum. 

Book/daddy's name puns on "bone daddy" and "mack daddy." Think of it as Pimp My Read. 
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Book/daddy's motto: Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt! (Roughly: To hell with those who published before us) 

- St. Jerome, quoting his teacher, Aelius Donatus

Book/daddy's logo. Only real book/daddies have it: 
(Hence the slash in book/daddy.)

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Books I'm currently recommending . . . 

In Life Class, Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker returns to World War I, the setting for her magnificent Restoration trilogy. Where those novels followed shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen through their convalescence and return to combat, Life Class follows three painting students (based on real Slade School artists Christopher Nevinson and Paul Nash) as the war approaches and they avoid it or embrace it. Elinor wants little to do with the war or with men: They're distractions from her art. Kit, a hot, young futurist, is primed for the war's industrialized destruction, while Paul flees his working-class background. As usual with Barker, the sexual relationships and war-time atmosphere (and gruesome battlefield details) are brilliantly conveyed: Her prose is lean but lyrical, compassionate yet cool-headed. No character is quite as compelling as Regeneration's bitter bisexual, Billy Prior, but the Great War's upheavals in art and combat, sex and class, provide Barker with material for truly exceptional historical novels. A new trilogy? One hopes so.
Not what I expected. Trespass begins so tense and almost violent, it seems it'll be a coolly-controlled literary thriller, something akin to Patricia Highsmith. The college son of an American couple -- the dad's a historian, the mom's a book illustrator -- brings home his unsettling new girlfriend, a beautiful, chilly Croatian. Mom disapproves, and her suspicions spark angrily when the young woman becomes pregnant and the two marry. Then there's the armed poacher wandering around shooting rabbits illegally on their land. Behind all this is Bush's duplicitous run-up to the Iraq War, and you can see the many ways the title plays out. But Trespass pivots in unexpected, perhaps too convenient ways. If the ending is too peaceful for what preceded it, Valerie Martin is still such a sharp, gripping writer, the novel captivated me.

Best of the Vault

Pat Barker, Frankenstein, Cass Sunstein on the internet, Samuel Johnson, Thrillers, Denis Johnson, Alan Furst, Caryl Phillips, Richard Flanagan, George Saunders, Michael Harvey, Larry McMurtry, Harry Potter and more

ESSAY: The irrelevance of book blogs and the significance of Jessa Crispin more

ESSAY: Big D between the sheets -- Dallas in fiction more

ESSAY: Reviewing the state of reviewing more

ESSAY: 9/11 as a novel: Why? more

ESSAY: How can critics say the things they do? And why does anyone pay attention? It's the issue of authority. more

The disappearing book pages: Papers are cutting book coverage for little reason more

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