These in-depth, thought-provoking, and often funny posts are the brainchild of The Book Barn's very own Glenn. He never fails to make a great recommendation, useful warning or entertaining suggestion!
A Note Before the First. An index of Subjects. The subjects: 1: Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited. 2: The Tale of Genji. 3: The poetry of Daniel Huws. 4: The novels of Jonis Agee. 5: Five (or twelve) great mysteries. 6: The literature of the Blasket Islands. 7: Zen: Shunryū Suzuki, Robert Aitken, R.H. Blyth, and Brian Victoria’s Zen At War. 8: The letters of Van Gogh, Keats, Helene Hanff, and the Shaw-Terry correspondence. 9: The journals of Pepys, Thoreau and Dorothy Wor
#288: RED FLOWERS. Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China (Crown, 2025) is a brisk and sobering read, written with a journalist’s sharp eye for the individual story that opens up whole levels of sociological comment. In reaction to the breakup of the Communist Party in Russia, Xi Jinping began to fear that the increasing freedoms in China, themselves in reaction against the severity of the Cultural Revolution, were a pos
