I feel a little down in the dumps these days. Mrs. Cohn Zohn is still recovering from her hip replacement and we don't go out much. And I feel like I have things on my mind, more than usual. When I go through periods like this one, I read like [...]
I just finished Philip K. Dick's novel "The Man in the High Castle." I've never read Dick before and I don't usually read sci fi or books about alternative realities, although this book is not sci fi. It is a very good novel and Dick is an unusual writer. He [...]
Ernest Hemingway is the stupidest great writer who ever lived, and perhaps the meanest. I reread "A Moveable Feast," over the weekend because I was in bed with a cold and I needed something that wasn't mentally challenging. I had not read the book in 40 years. It is a [...]
When I was a graduate student in the English Department at Stanford, Ian Watt was the chairman and he directed my dissertation on Joseph Conrad and he was an academic genius. He sometimes preferred books to people although he had a terrific sense of humor, and he once told me, [...]
This is not a sports post, Stan and Neal. You may want to turn back now. That goes for everyone else looking for sports at this moment. Got that? I have a question and I need your help, but first some background. I am reading Saul Bellow's letters -- a [...]
I appreciate all of you who wrote in your recommendations for best sports book you ever read. If you don't mind, I'll take the liberty to add a few titles. I list these thinking you may look for them and enjoy them. George Plimpton was a good writer and a [...]
Here's your assignment for today. Name the best sports book you ever read. There's a lot of stuff out there. Here's an admission. I find most sports books dismal, really unreadable. But some are glorious. So I'm giving you your chance to make a case for a book you love. [...]
This is about Andre Agassi's autobiography, "Open." I admit I'm late getting to this book -- it came out in 2009. There's a reason. I almost never read sports books. They almost universally are not well written and I read slowly and can't waste time on bad prose. That sounds [...]
This is not a sports post. If what you're looking for is more Al Davis or Jim Harbaugh or whatever, please skip this one. This is about books. It's about my reading life and how it almost came to an end because of "War and Peace" and how Huck Finn [...]
Lowell Cohn, retired columnist for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, covered sports for almost 40 years and never ran out of things to say.