It's MLB playoffs. What are you reading?

Recommended reading during the World Series playoffs:

Wait Till Next Year, Doris Kearns Goodwin (earned one of my only Goodreads' five stars this year)
This Dark Road to Mercy, Wiley Cash (earned one of my only other Goodreads' five stars this year)
Calico Joe, John Grisham
The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, Howard Bryant
Beyond Belief: Finding the Strength to Come Back, Josh Hamilton

What other baseball books have you read?

And, Go Cubs!

Simon Callow's Charles Dickens

Two people have recently said exactly the same thing to me: that I must be planning to assign a lot of Dickens to my high schoolers this fall, because I'd loaded my Goodreads to-read shelf with a bunch of his novels. The real reason is that I've just finished Simon Callow's new biography, Charles Dickens (or called Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World in the U.S.), which I picked up in London to coincide with Callow's one-man play on Dickens which I saw (it was wonderful, by the way). For nearly two hours Callow gave the audience Dickens' bio, hitting all the highlights of his interesting life. Sound a little boring? It wasn't. Callow was highly entertaining. So was his book. I'd learned a lot of new information about Dickens on my 2010 trip to London when I visited his house museum in Bloomsbury. A lot of what Callow did for me though was give both extra information and a fresh perspective on what I already did know about Dickens. Also while reading the bio, I realized how few novels by Dickens I've actually read (only Bleak House, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol), so I'm motivated to change that. I've got Oliver Twist downloaded onto my Kindle to start when the right moment comes. Here are a few photos from the Charles Dickens Museum:

 

Homer and Langley

While I was away, I got to read a book I won through a Goodreads giveaway (many thanks, Random House!). Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow has just come out in paperback. I relished every word of this book about two compulsively hoarding brothers and their life inside a New York City brownstone. The best thing about this book is that I could visualize all of the items piled high inside their home. The thing that made this even better is that it was all described by Homer, the brother who was blind. The ending of the book will throw you for a loop. It left me wanting to know more about these brothers (the book is based on two real brothers), so I hope to do some more reading on them soon.

E.L. Doctorow's website has several author interviews; in the spirit of just having returned from England, I listened to the interview conducted by BBC Radio, which you can listen to here. In addition, here is the book's review from the New York Times.