by Richard Subber | Sep 28, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
and another read, another day…
Book review:
The Book Lovers’ Anthology:
A Compendium of Writing
about Books, Readers & Libraries
Oxford, UK: The Bodleian Library, 2014
344 pages
Are you dying to know what 201 authors who picked up a wide array of quills, pencils, and pens in the last 500 years had to say about books, readers, and libraries?
This anthology leaves out a few remarks, to be sure. I guess it’s fair to say there’s something for everyone.
You don’t have to be a book lover to soak up some of the joys that some of these authors tried to immortalize on paper.
You don’t have to be a book lover to imagine what else they might have said.
You can open The Book Lovers’ Anthology to a random page, and read for a while, and experience most of the good feeling that you’re going to get from opening to any random page.
You can leave a lot of it for another read, another day.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Fire in the Lake (book review)
you should have read it in 1972…
by Frances FitzGerald
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 11, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
Check out May Sarton’s poems
Book review:
Good Poems: American Places
Garrison Keillor (b1942), ed.
New York: Viking, 2011
484 pages
Keillor is no slouch when it comes to picking readable poems, I give him full credit for that.
However, there are so many poems here that this volume isn’t selective in any meaningful way.
Good Poems: American Places has themed sections that are obviously different but the topics aren’t obviously useful.
Is there something for everyone here?
Does anyone really care?
I found a few gems: for example, poems by Tom Hennen and May Sarton.
‘Nuff said.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
How does a poem end?
“Finis,” my thoughts (my poem)
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 4, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
…of pears and bears…
Book review:
Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems
by David Russell Wagoner (1926-2021)
A prolific American writer, poet, novelist
It’s a pleasure to recommend Traveling Light. Wagoner has some heavy duty poetry chops.
Any serious poet can learn from his examples. Repeatedly, as I read through Traveling Light, I wanted to pick up my pen and grab a piece of paper and try my hand at writing the images he sees.
Readers, dig in! Wagoner finds the right words for those feelings, those realities that you didn’t imagine before you read his intuitions…
…such as, feeding a whole sack of fresh pears to a camel in the zoo:
“…She watched me disappear,
Then with a rippling trudge went back to her stable
To snort, to browse on hay, to remember my sack forever.
She’d been used to having no pears, but hadn’t known it…”
…such as, on meeting a bear in the bear’s own woods:
“…Withdraw without turning and start saying
Softly, monotonously, whatever comes to mind
Without special pleading:
Nothing hurt or reproachful to appeal to his better feelings.
He has none, only a harder life than yours…”
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Poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Aug 31, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language
prime times of life…
Book review:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
New York: Harper Perennial, 1961, 1994
187 pages
Miss Jean Brodie, an exceedingly unconventional teacher, described every part of her life and her commitments and her outlook as being “in my prime,” but it is a hallmark of Muriel Spark’s magnificent talent in assembling the best words that it is left to the reader to completely imagine what “prime” may mean.
The defining value of the novel is the unceasing willingness and undaunted desire of Brodie’s carefully chosen students—the girls in the “Brodie set”—to try to figure out what “prime” means and to try to understand the effects their teacher is having on them.
The pages are filled with interactions and misunderstandings and hormonal energies. Miss Brodie and the other grownups dramatically pursue their teaching roles, but the girls largely find their own ways to learn things and work at growing up while doing so.
The book ends but the story doesn’t end. Henry Adams said a teacher can never tell “where (her) influence stops.” The ultimately humiliated Miss Brodie dies, but her prime has no boundaries and her students make their own lives.
p.s. the acclaimed movie with the same name and Maggie Smith as Miss Brodie is first class entertainment, but it mostly ignores Muriel Spark’s grimly realistic portrayal of the life forces that animate the “Brodie set.”
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Proud Tower
…a lot more than a history book…
by Barbara Tuchman
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jul 20, 2025 | Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke
“Pour yourself out like a fountain…”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Bohemian-Austrian poet
Rilke wrote with nuance. Spend some time with his poetry. A second or third experience with his lines often exposes the reader to poignantly different understandings, new intuitions, lusciously incremental meanings…
Apparently he did not intend “Pour yourself out like a fountain” to be explicit advice for poets, but I think the phrase does good duty for that purpose. Especially I like the exhortation to “pour.” I’m happy when my poems are a gushing reflection of what I feel and see.
Rilke offered more. His full statement was:
“Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.”
That’s good for a second read. Think fountain-ish.
Source:
Rainer Maria Rilke, Part Two, XII, of The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Poems of Robert Frost
he hears bluebirds talking…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Jul 17, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Language, Politics, Power and inequality, Reflections
“…to make lies sound truthful…”
Book review:
What Orwell Didn’t Know:
Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics
Andras Szanto, ed.
New York: Public Affairs, 2007.
236 pages.
This collection by Andras Szanto was published before the Obama presidency and what followed.
Essays by Martin Kaplan, Victor Navasky, and Geoffrey Cowan, in particular, illuminate these insightful, topical revelations about media failure to communicate truths.
George Orwell’s well-known essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is still useful and challenging, almost 75 years after he wrote it.
An excerpt from What Orwell Didn’t Know:
“…the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language…Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind…”
It is a terrifying reality that this statement sounds like it was written yesterday.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bartender’s Tale
Ivan Doig’s story, I mostly loved it…
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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