Old Mole Reading List
By Larry Bowlden
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Podcast Description
Larry Bowlden reviews contemporary fiction and non-fiction as part of the Old Mole Variety Hour Monday mornings on KBOO 90.7 fm, Portland, Oregon. Monthly.
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
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1 |
Wallace Stegner | I want to talk to you this morning about one of the truly great American writers of the 20th century, Wallace Stegner. His biographer, as well as many admirers and even Stegner himself, insist that he has been marginalized by the Eastern intellectual pre | 5/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
Torch by Cheryl Strayed | The fact is that as organic beings, we are situated towards death. Martin Heidegger announces that one of the universal and necessary conditions of being human is being-towards-death; he calls these universal and necessary conditions existentialia. So ma | 5/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
How It All Began by Penelpe Lively | What is it like for a being to live in time and to be consciously, even obsessively, aware of living in time? This question has captured the attention of so many philosophers in the past hundred years or so, but it is novelists who actually describe the | 3/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick | Some of my reader friends who have read or heard a number of my reviews tease me by saying that apparently I’ve never met I book I didn’t like. It’s true that I almost never review books that I think are bad; the truth is that I almost never even b | 12/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
The Little Bride by Anna Solomon | Some works of fiction leave the reader marveling over the imaginative powers of the author; such is the case with Anna Solomon’s debut novel, The Little Bride. We are introduced to the lead-character, Minna Losk, when she is sixteen and living in Odess | 11/21/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein | If you ever look closely at the rational arguments for the existence of some god or other, I think you will find that only those who already believe on grounds quite other than reason or argument tend to be impressed by the arguments. The arguments, some | 10/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen | Good morning, I want to talk to you this morning about a wonderful little collection of stories by a woman who died years before they were published. Thanks to the perseverance of her husband and the endorsement of a number of well-known writers, the sto | 9/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
Love Child by Sheila Kohler | Try to imagine yourself at seventeen, madly in love with a boy not much older than you, but knowing that because he is Jewish, and you the daughter of a not wealthy but nevertheless haughty, authoritarian father, you will never be able to openly date or | 8/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell | It always feels a bit like magic to be swept away by a new author, caught up in the lives of fictional characters so thoroughly that they seem in many ways more real than the folks one is dealing with everyday. Maggie O’Farrell is a writer of extraordi | 7/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa | Most of you who are avid readers will already have read one of the many novels by the Nobel Prize winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. For some reason, I had not been introduced to him until picking up a copy of his 2006 novel The Bad Girl. The et | 6/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
Hungry For The World by Kim Barnes | By the time I was thirteen…I would have come to understand that it was Eve who desired the fruit and its store of hidden knowledge, Eve who had damned us all from the Garden. Years away from that child sleeping in her mother’s arms, I would enter int | 4/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson | I want to talk to you this morning about an exquisitely simple and beautiful little book by the Norwegian author Per Petterson entitled Out Stealing Horses. On the surface, the story is about a sixty-seven year old man who decides to drastically simplify | 3/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy | I want to talk to you about another collection of short fiction by a young and very talented writer by the name of Maile Meloy. This collection has the intriguing title: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Most of the short story writers I have been rea | 2/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans | On the front flap of Danielle Evans debut book of stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, it says that she “explores the nonwhite experience in contemporary America with honesty, wisdom, and humor.” She certainly does that, and she seems eq | 1/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
Double Vision by Pat Barker | Unlike Pat Barker’s horrible/wonderful depiction of war up close in her now famous Regeneration trilogy, her 2003 novel, Double Vision, has its setting far from actual theaters of war, but war and its effects on everyday people are still dominant theme | 12/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis | Once in awhile a writer comes along who is so good that it’s almost startling. Deborah Willis is one such writer, and I would be very surprised if she does not become a very well known and well respected author. Vanishing and Other Stories is her debut | 12/6/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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17 |
Black Dogs by Ian McEwan | There is no doubt that Ian McEwan is a great storyteller who won’t hesitate to tell rather bleak and creepy stories in order to make points about the human condition in general and contemporary life in particular. At least for this reader, there are ti | 11/1/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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18 |
Next Of Kin by Johanna Trollope | There are some writers who provide readers a kind of oasis of hope and solace even when writing about an unpredictable and in many ways menacing world. Johanna Trollope is one such writer, and her novel Next of Kin leaves the reader with a kind of guarded | 9/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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19 |
Ghost Road, by Pat Barker | “Murder was only killing in the wrong place.” So reflects Rivers, the therapist who is a central character in all three of the novels in Pat Barker’s incredible World War I trilogy. Ghost Road is the third of the trilogy, and the one for which she r | 8/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 19 Episodes |
