Best?

The Boston Phoenix just released their Best of 2005 issue.

I'm most surprised by best burrito and best Mexican: Anna's Taqueria. Good lord, it's fast food Mexican. Yes I've enjoyed a burrito at Anna's and will walk over on my lunch break and get a taco now and then, but the best Mexican Boston has to offer!? What about Zocalo or Ole (I know, they're kind of the same), or Tu Y Yo (haven't been, heard it's great). Anna's just doesn't seem right for Best Mexican.

Latest Reads

Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City was amazing. Prosey because he's a poet and painful because it's so personal and honest. I read in an interview that some of the writing was so intense that he'd keep falling asleep because he was so overwhelmed. Definitely one of the best memoirs I've ever read.

Christopher Kennedy Lawford's Symptoms of Withdrawal : A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption was interesting. Although it was his mother's generation that we think of as having lost so many of their own, it's true for the next generation as well. Drugs and alcohol took away years and years of their lives and some did not survive. The older ones experienced the deaths of JFK and RFK as children and then had to cope with devastated parents and so many fatherless cousins. Christopher Lawford is a survivor and I appreciated reading his story, but something about him irked me. For all that he's been through I didn't sense much humility. Maybe it just didn't come through in his writing.

Next in line to read is the enormous Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. I've already skimmed it and found the part where he's living in Watertown across the street from my great grandparents. Not that I doubted the family story, but I wanted to be certain. They are not mentioned, but his house number on Dexter Ave is and indeed, they were neighbors and worked at Hood Rubber at the same time.