After struggling through the last book, it was lucky for me that I had been looking at a list of “top 100 American novels of the 20th century” recently. Cranky at the old literature canon and noticing what important American writers were so obviously absent, I decided to re-read some Toni Morrison books.

Morrison’s stories flow smoothly and though the shifts in narrative point of view sometimes feel unnatural, I love how she presents contexts for the characters. This edition includes an afterword written in 1993.

(parts 3 and 4)

It’s been a year and a half since I read the first two parts of this book—when I unpacked my books, I put the ones I hadn’t read on the top shelf so I would remember to read or finish them.

While some chapters are a bit dry for casual reading, it’s not too hard to figure out which chapters and sections are skimmable if you going for a non-intensive reading. So much of Jacobs’ theory is based on solid common sense that it’s a bit astounding that the same bad decisions (or worse decisions) around planning are made today. Reading this has given me a new observational base and vocabulary for why some neighborhoods and towns seem to “work” and why some don’t.

» Interview from Reason magazine (on gentrification and the New Urbanists)

This probably wasn’t the best book of Mansfield’s to get, as only the first group of stories are “finished” and the rest of the book is just fragments put together after she died suddenly. The stories are very short and concise, which was an interesting contrast to the Munro stories. But I’m not really into reading period stories sometimes.

For the most part I felt disappointed with Munro’s new collection, though there are a few stories that I liked a lot. I’d read the title story in the New Yorker a few months ago, so perhaps that one just wasn’t as fresh in a re-reading. The trio of stories involving Juliet were pretty good as a set, but I felt that none of them would have stood up on their own without the other ones to give context. It took me forever to sort out the characters in “Trespasses” and by that point I’m sure I missed many of the nuances. “Tricks” was probably my favorite story, just how it successfully arcs across decades. Overall I kept feeling like either I just wasn’t in a short story mood or I kept noticing the seams of the stories.