Give him something to think about. Show Falstaff that big guys need books too. Told in the present tense, the story begins in the hard-drinking port town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and steams out onto the tumultuous high seas of the Atlantic, where an improbably violent storm swallows a swordfishing boat. Lifelong Grad has found 17 years in graduate school a surprisingly enriching experience. According to de Botton, readers always look for themselves in a novel's characters.
Essayists weigh in on the potato famine, early churches, machine politics, and Irish theater.
The cumulative effect is to make you crave a more systematic cultural history. Just Out finds drag queens a hoot. Time to get Out grounded in his new sexual identity. That's Beacon Hill Bananas. She's been a docent at the Gardner museum since it was built.