Charlie Sheen survives his own history of addiction to deliver a surprising memoir in “The Book of Sheen,” a three-voice fugue of stardom, debauchery, and Casanova-like reflections. He skips the Hollywood trap of mawkish regret as his narrative energy and wit recount a life spent mostly in a drug-induced haze.
Books
Saturday in Byblos:
Saturday in Byblos:
François de Rosset’s Story of the Execution of Two Siblings
François Rosset was a bestselling French writer who in 1619 fictionalized the story of the tragic 1603 execution of Marguerite and Julien de Ravalet for adultery and incest after eloping to escape social norms and, for Marguerite, a decrepit husband. Rosset questioned the brutal judicial system and described the couple with remarkable compassion even as he nodded in the direction of the era’s social and religious norms. The theme has since evolved through literature, art and law, with at times surprising results.
François de Rosset, “Of a Brother and Sister’s Incestuous Love and Tragic End” (1619)
A translation from the French of François de Rosset’s “Of A Brother and Sister’s Incestuous Love and Tragic End,” or “Des amours incestueuses d’un frère et d’une soeur et de leur fin malheureuse et tragique,” form Rosset’s 1619 collection, Tragic Stories (“Histoires tragiques.”)
Saturday in Byblos:
Wendell Berry’s Celebration of Old Jack’s Crusty Life
Wendell Berry’s 1974 novel explores the final day of Jack Beechum. The narrative drifts through decades of Kentucky history as Jack finds sanctuary in the land but remains alienated from the people on it or in his life. The prose reaches heights of elegiac beauty, occasionally descending into mawkish parody and didactic sneers as Berry maintains a tension between agrarian ideals and harsh judgment of urban progress and human failure. The novel is part of the Port William series.
Saturday in Byblos:
John Updike and Paul Bowles do Morocco
American authors John Updike and Paul Bowles portray Morocco in two short stories that start from the same geographic spot on the Mediterranean. Bowles approaches his Moroccan characters with a lyrical detachment that leaves room for interpretation. Updike projects a bleak, fear-driven racism reducing Arabs to menacing stereotypes. Both writers reveal much more about American anxieties and orientalist attitudes than the actual North African landscape they visited.
New Endowment Secures Future Funding for Dolly Parton Imagination Library in Flagler County
Local resident Linda Mahran has established the Flagler County Early Literacy Endowment to provide free, age-appropriate books every month to children from birth to age five. Coordinated in partnership with local organizations, the fund will sustain the region’s Dolly Parton Imagination Library program. By raising community donations, the endowment aims to eliminate year-to-year fundraising dependence, foster early reading habits, and improve vital overall school readiness.
Deep Reading Is Your Best Tool Against Misinformation
The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation. Deep reading can be an effective way to counter misinformation as well as reduce stress and loneliness. It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills.
Saturday in Byblos:
Raja Shehadeh’s Vanishing Palestine
Florida’s House Bill 31 seeks to rename the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” erasing Palestinian history and rights to their land and violating international law. Raja Shehadeh’s “Palestinian Walks,” originally published in 2007, explores the systematic expropriation of Palestinian land through legal chicanery, balkanization, theft and settler vigilantism. But it does so through six walks that, for all the politics and bitter history, also have the transcendent feel of inner discovery of the soul through nature or reverence for the deep roots of genealogy through places as ordinary as a hillside.
Saturday in Byblos:
Sophocles’s ‘Ajax’ and the Savagery of Honor
Sophocles’ Ajax remains a visceral critique of the destructive power of pride and the vanity of hollow honor. By contrasting Ajax’s murderous fury with the profound empathy of Ulysses, the play explores the transition from fanatical violence to civil justice. It serves as a timely reminder that true nobility lies not in vengeance, but in recognizing our shared human frailty.
Florida House Moves to Ban Certain School Library Books Regardless of Literary or Artistic Value
A Florida House committee has approved HB 1119, a bill establishing a specific legal definition for school library materials deemed “harmful to minors.” The legislation builds on a 2023 law by potentially allowing the removal of books even if they possess literary, artistic, or scientific value. While supporters argue the measure protects students from pornography, critics contend it facilitates censorship and unfairly targets LGBTQ narratives. The bill now heads to the House floor for a final vote.
Saturday in Byblos:
Saul Bellow Goes Looking for Mr. Black
In “Looking for Mr. Green,” Saul Bellow crafts a “Heart of Darkness” in Depression-era Chicago. Classically educated George Grebe hunts for an elusive check recipient, navigating a Black neighborhood Bellow depicts as a “blighted” backdrop. The author’s sublime prose serves a supremacist lens, reducing human beings to transactional props for Grebe’s enlightenment.
Saturday in Byblos
Claptrapped in the Underworld: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘Morning Star’
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “The Morning Star” following nine interconnected Norwegians over two sweltering August days, using a sudden celestial event to explore the boundaries of life and death. The narrative is addictive and atmospheric but devolves into incoherent theological meanderings and dangling plot threads. Knausgaard proves to be a masterful architect of labyrinths but an ultimately unsatisfying guide through them.
Saturday in Byblos
Getting to Know Karl Ove Knausgaard
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” is a polarizing masterpiece of autofiction, blending mundane details with profound existential dread. Despite his flat style and occasionally tedious philosophical tangents, Knausgaard’s uncompromising honesty regarding family, addiction, and self-loathing creates a bewitching, page-turning intimacy as he ennobles the ordinary. His place as a Scandinavian literary giant seems assured even as he tests the reader’s patience with his massive scale.
Reading Into Them: Flagler County Leaders’ Favorite Books of 2025
The third edition of FlaglerLive’s annual best reads project celebrates the personal joy of reading over academic or literary hierarchies. Featuring contributions from a local judge, attorneys, elected and other Flagler County leaders, the collection highlights diverse favorites ranging from Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” and Erik Larson’s history to a legal decisions and self-actualization books. Here’s to venturing beyond comfort zones to discover transformative titles.
County Opens Nexus Center in Bunnell, Giving West Side ‘True Jewel’ Library Albanese Imagined 19 Years Ago
Flagler County officials opened the $16 million Nexus Center in Bunnell on Thursday, delivering a long-awaited standalone library to the county’s west side. The 23,000-square-foot facility on Commerce Parkway replaces a cramped storefront and now houses both the library branch and the Health and Human Services Department.
A Tour of New Nexus Center Is a ‘Coast to Country’ Surfing Experience in Flagler’s Ultra-Modern Library
Library Board of Trustees members and others took a tour of the new, $16 million Nexus Center, the south-side library in Bunnell, on Monday. It’s not just the floor space or the large windows, the natural light, the high ceilings and the blue-green trim that make you feel as if you’re not entirely indoors. The entire 23,000-square-foot building, with the exception of the back offices and the segment reserved for the Department of Health and Human Services, is designed along a “Coast to Country” theme that creates a sense of motion as if from one to the other and back.
Loving Penguins Lose as Federal Judge Backs School Board’s Ban of ‘And Tango Makes Three’
A federal judge this week rejected a challenge to a 2023 decision by the Escambia County School Board to remove the book “And Tango Makes Three” from school libraries, ruling the move did not violate First Amendment rights. “And Tango Makes Three,” which tells the story of two male penguins who raised a penguin chick at New York’s Central Park Zoo, has become a prominent part of a debate in recent years about removing or restricting access to books at Florida schools. The Escambia County lawsuit alleged the book was targeted for its depictions of same-sex parents raising a child.
Florida Schools and Parents Censored 444 Book Titles in 2025, Down from 732
Both the Florida Department of Education and PEN America, a nonprofit advocating for freedom of expression, have released their annual lists of books removed from school classrooms and libraries, each reporting fewer removals than last year.
Every Week Is Banned Book Week in Florida
Every day seems to bring another hissy fit from a state goon or “concerned” parent hell-bent on returning us to the glory days of censorship. We live in a state where librarians are called child abusers for offering books such as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “What Girls Are Made Of,” “The Bluest Eye,” “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” “Slaughterhouse Five,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”–written by a Booker Prize winner, a National Book Award winner, winner of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Nobel Prize laureate.
NASCAR’s Erik Jones Brings His Love of Reading, and a Book-Vending Machine, to Rymfire Elementary
NASCAR driver Erik Jones and his foundation, in partnership with AdventHealth, have been donating book-vending machines to schools in Volusia County and new Flagler County as a literacy initiative, with Jones appearing at schools to read to students, as he did Friday at Rymfire Elementary.
The Truth About Flagler’s Public Libraries: Doing Far More Than You Realize, with Far Less Than Necessary
The Flagler County Public Library system remains one of the most–if not the most–efficient divisions of county government. Even with the staffing necessary at the new Bunnell library come December, the system’s personnel will have grown by just 20 percent in 20 years, while county government grew 37 percent, Palm Coast government grew 49 percent, and the county population grew by 84 percent. For all that, the library system continues to be the target of criticism without context or evidence, when it should be championed.
Federal Judge Rules Unconstitutional Part of Florida Law That Led to Book Purges from School Libraries
Siding with publishers and authors, a federal judge Wednesday ruled that a key part of a 2023 Florida law that has led to books being removed from school library shelves is “overbroad and unconstitutional.” U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza issued a 50-page decision in a First Amendment lawsuit filed last year against members of the State Board of Education and the school boards in Orange and Volusia counties.
Supreme Court Redefines Education Opt-Outs Along Religious Lines
An interfaith coalition of Muslim, Orthodox Christian and Catholic parents in Montgomery County, Maryland – including Tamer Mahmoud, for whom the case is named – questioned the school board’s refusal to allow them to opt their young children out of lessons using picture books with LGBTQ+ characters. Ruling in favor of the parents, the court found that the board violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion by requiring their children to sit through lessons with materials inconsistent with their faiths.
How Orwell’s ‘1984’ Explains the Debasing of History to Control You
When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign. It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past. The president has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.” Such ambitions are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.
Why Is the President Undermining Libraries and Museums?
A few weeks ago, President Trump issued an executive order calling for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), adding to a growing list of illegal efforts to bypass Congress and abolish entire government agencies. All staff at the agency were placed on administrative leave on March 31. IMLS is an independent federal agency that provides crucial financial support to America’s 125,000 public, school, academic, and special libraries and museums nationwide.
Flagler Beach’s Randy Jaye Releases ‘Florida Flashpoints,’ His 5th Book, on Florida History
Flagler Beach author and historian Randy Jaye released his fifth book on March 18: Florida Flashpoints: Extraordinary Moments From Spanish Colony to the Space Age. The book highlights Florida’s long, interesting and sometimes turbulent history with what the author consider to be 36 of the state’s most important historic moments.
Read Across Flagler Event at Central Park Brings Out the District’s Own Student Novelists
The second annual Read Across Flagler at Palm Coast’s Central Park, an event organized by the school district’s media specialists, focused on the district’s own authors , including three high school students who have already published their first novel and are working on their second. There was a petting zoo, a balloon art station and two tables-full of books being given away, but the focus was on the writers.
Federal Judge Clears Way for Publishers’ Lawsuit Against Florida and Volusia Boards of Education Over Banned Books
With major publishing companies and authors arguing a 2023 state law violates First Amendment rights, a federal judge Friday refused to dismiss a lawsuit against members of the State Board of Education over the removal of school library books. U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza, appointed by President Obama, rejected a state motion to dismiss the case, which also names as defendants members of the Orange County and Volusia County school boards.
Remembrance of Reads Past: Flagler County Leaders and Thinkers’ Favorite Books of 2024
What started last year as FlaglerLive’s end-of-year gift to our readers is back this year with 18 community leaders and thinkers sharing with us their favorite book of the year. Each was a surprise, a discovery, a challenge in the most rewarding sense. Your to-read pile is sure to grow. Happy New Reads in what we hope will be a page-turning 2025.
As Florida Celebrates Ignorance, SAT Scores and College Rankings Drop, Teachers Flee
A recent column in the Independent Florida Alligator laments how college professors and other educators who teach disfavored subjects or use certain words are beginning to self-censor. The headline reads, “Think While It’s Still Legal.” Gov. Ron DeSantis and his angry regime aren’t big fans of thinking. Or learning. They hate and fear knowledge.
Justifying Book Bans, Florida Says It’s Not Required to Provide Libraries to School Students. Publishers Disagree.
Major publishing companies and authors Friday argued that a federal judge should deny Florida’s request to dismiss a lawsuit over the removal of school library books, saying a controversial state law violates First Amendment rights. Attorneys disputed a state position that selection of school library books is “government speech” and, as a result, is not subject to the First Amendment.
Don’t Ban Health-Related Books from Florida Schools, Groups Urge
Four groups — the Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFTRP), PEN America, EveryLibrary, and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCA) — sent a letter to school superintendents and attorneys representing Florida’s school boards urging restraint when it comes to books that include topics such as anatomy, teen pregnancy, and sexual assault.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel’s Jim Crow-Like Apartheid
Aware of the racism that surrounds him as a Black American, Coates can imagine himself as both Palestinian and Israeli. This generosity of imagination does not prevent critical analysis. His accounts of life in the occupied West Bank underline the reality that Israel has imposed a regime that is effectively based on the subordination and dispossession of Palestinians – and a deliberate attempt, he writes, to deny any possibility of a genuine two-state solution.
On Voltaire’s Birthday, a Look Back at Candide, Tale of Human Folly in Times of Crisis
Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism (1759) is widely recognised as his masterpiece. A darkly satirical novella taking aim at human folly, pride and excessive faith in reason’s ability to plumb the deepest metaphysical truths, it remains as telling in this era of pandemics and wild conspiracy theories as when first published.
Moby-Dick, The Book for Our Times
We can’t afford permanent enmity or exile from each other. Secession and civil war might be a nice distraction but consumer splurging suggests that’s not in the cards. So for all of us grass-leaved Americans, “Moby-Dick” is the book for us, in this moment, in this whale of whiteness delirium. “Moby-Dick” is our book of revelation.
Federal Judge Cites ‘Legislative Privilege’ to Shield School Board Members from testifying in Book Ban Case
A federal judge has shielded Escambia County School Board members from having to testify in a legal battle about the removal of children’s books from school libraries. United States Magistrate Judge Zachary C. Bolitho on Friday issued a 15-page order agreeing with the school board that members do not have to give depositions because of what is known as “legislative privilege.”
Hurricane Milton Damage Forces Flagler Beach Public Library, a City Treasure, to Close Until Further Notice
Hurricane Milton’s rains caused some damage at the Flagler Beach Library, requiring services to be limited to curbsides, with even those services now suspended. A reopening date is not yet certain, but is probable later this month.
In Victory for Freedom to Read, Florida School District Wil Return 36 Books to Shelves in Lawsuit Settlement
Authors of the children’s book “And Tango Makes Three” and parents of students have reached a settlement with the Nassau County school district that will lead to 36 books returning to school libraries after being removed last year, according to court documents filed this week. The settlement came in a federal lawsuit filed in May amid widespread controversy about removing books from school libraries in Florida and other states.
Flagler Library’s ‘Nexus Center’ Breaks Ground with a Shovelful of History and Images of a Future Page-Turner
Flagler County, Palm Coast and Bunnell officials along with advocates and friends of the library gathered at the 7-acre site of the future “Nexus Center” south branch library for a groundbreaking today, which was as much of a celebration of the future building as it was a recognition of Library Director Holly Albanese’s perseverance to finally get to this point, after nine or 19 years, depending on hos you calculate it.
Libraries Are Cornerstones of Our Communities. They Need Our Help.
In the ongoing culture war, conservative politicians have been taking drastic measures to stop the distribution of “age-inappropriate books,” which primarily target children’s books by and about LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color. These measures ignore the crucial role that libraries serve in their communities in combating the effects of economic inequality by providing essential resources to those in need.
2 Parents Suing Over Book Bans in St. Johns Schools Tell Flagler Freedom to Read Activists: ‘Be Loud and Proud’
Nancy Tray and Anne Watts, parents suing in federal court over book bans in St. Johns County, were guests today of the weekly meeting in Palm Coast of the Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a non-profit Chaired by Rabbi Merrill Shapiro. The group took stock of the state of book bans in the two counties and the state, how to counter them, and what to expect next.
Rymfire Elementary Students Celebrate School Year’s End With Another Battle of the Books
Last week students from every grade at Rymfire Elementary organized in teams and competed to show their reading prowess after spending the school year reading at least six titles out of a list of 15, for students in grades 3-5, or 12 books out of 15 for students in grades K-2. Team captains had to read all the books on the lists, though many students end up doing so as well–and more.
Paul Auster, An American Writer with a European Sensibility
With the passing of Paul Auster, who died of lung cancer on April 30 at the age of 77, the aesthetics of postmodernism retreated another significant step back into the past tense of history. Auster became closely associated with postmodern style because of his highly self-conscious and self-reflexive fiction. In 2017, he wrote that he “wanted to turn everything inside out.”
William Bartram Living History Fest at Alpine Groves Park Marks Naturalist Visit’s 250th Anniversary
On Saturday, May 11, the St. Johns County Parks and Recreation Department, in coordination with the St. Johns Cultural Council, will hold the 2024 Bartram Living History Fest at Alpine Groves Park, this year commemorating the 250th anniversary of naturalist William Bartram’s historic visit to Florida.
1st Amendment Lawsuit Over Florida School District’s Ban of Children’s Book Cleared to Proceed
A federal judge has ruled that two authors and a student can pursue First Amendment claims against the Escambia County School Board over the removal of the children’s book “And Tango Makes Three” from library shelves. But U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, in a 27-page decision Thursday, dismissed allegations against state education officials and leaders of the Lake County school district.
How 19th Century Women Wrote About Marital Rape
Over a century before it was criminalized, two key groups of women – colonial writers and suffrage agitators – began to criticize a husband’s legal right to rape his wife. These criticisms took many different forms, ranging from self-published feminist journals to novels, short stories, serial fiction and poetry.
Betty Smith’s ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ at 80
The New York in the 1940s, the setting for Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” was not the city we know today. The Empire State Building had not reached its full height, nor had the statue of “Alice in Wonderland” taken up residence in Central Park. Brooklyn, too, was still becoming itself – and no other 20th-century American novel did quite so much for the borough’s reputation.
‘Reading Is My Passion’ Sums Up Read Across Flagler Literacy Celebration Bookmarked by Media Specialists
Read Across Flagler Literacy Night at Palm Coast’s Town Center was as much a celebration of reading as it was of the school district’s media specialists who, pound for pound, have been the single-most besieged group of professionals in the district in the last couple of years of book bans, disrespect and ignorant rhetoric from the very school board members who should be championing them.
Moms for Liberty’s Book of Morons
The moms of Moms for “Liberty” are feeling a little touchy, put-upon, even diminished. Their do-boy DeSantis crashed out of the presidential race. They’re losing school board elections. They’re making idiots of themselves in the national media, as when Moms co-founder Tiffany Justice simultaneously defends taking books off school library shelves while denying that Moms want books taken off school library shelves, unless they’re by Black writers or gay writers, or ones dealing with the Holocaust, racism, or any sex.
Flagler Beach Is Fiercely Opposed to Consolidating Library With County, But Cooperative Intrigues Even Jane Mealy
Flagler Beach on Thursday formally rejected an inquiry by Flagler County government about the possibility of merging the Flagler Beach Public Library with the county’s system. But that does not necessarily close the book on a collaborative partnership. City Commissioner Jane Mealy, the fiercest defender of the Flagler Beach library’s independence, is intrigued by the possibility of a cooperative that would preserve that independence but expand Flagler Beach residents’ access to county library resources, likely at no additional cost.